It's the strangest thing...

For this marathon training cycle, I've gone all in on being a very intentional with each and every run. I didn't always trust the process and thought my Garmin had gone absolutely nuts for analyzing the training data the way it does.

But then we had a couple weeks of cooler temps and my body was so happy and things just got EASIER. I ran faster, my heartrate stayed even lower than normal, and I wasn't totally exhausted. It's like all the experts were right or something.

My Garmin doubled down on its craziness the other day. I ran 16 miles this past Saturday at about 20-30 seconds per mile faster overall than what I'd been doing my long runs. It was the longest run I'd done since January, I had a 5 minute second half negative split, and it was right around the overall pace of the previous week's 14 mile run, a run which incorporated 4 race pace miles. It felt good. And my heartrate average was 5 beats per minute LOWER than the 14-miler. So then my Garmin tells me this:

Could it be? Am I officially in badass shape? Apparently my Garmin thinks so.

No way am I getting anywhere near a 3:27, but I don't think the analysis could be so far off that I can't run that 3:52.

I read an article titled "Change your mindset to improve your race times." It couldn't have come at a better time, right when I'm starting to incorporate race pace miles into my long run and I'm pushing myself harder during hard workouts now that the weather is better.

Be mindful of the deceptive paralysis that can take hold when you become intimidated by your increasingly faster paces.

Basically this means that we allow the fear of the faster paces we are running, and the daunting thought of actually running that in a race, hold us back on race day. We are physiologically capable of our goal, but our minds work against us and we fail to truly believe in our ability. We fear going "balls to the wall" and then failing.

I need to go Balls-to-the-Wall no matter what and just hold on for dear life and not let my brain tell me otherwise and suck up the pain and just cross that finish line three minutes under my Boston qualifying time.

Maybe if I keep writing that down, it'll imbed itself in my brain and the deceptive mental paralysis won't happen to me in those later miles of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Marathon.

During our Tuesday interval run, the plan was to run 6 x 6 minute intervals at 8:15 pace with a 1 minute recovery. With warm up and cool down it would be a 7 mile workout.

The weather was nice out and I ended up running on average 7:53 pace for those 6 intervals. I could've run another one. I wasn't really all that spent during the cool down. Because of the warm up and cooldown miles and the recovery periods, my average overall pace for these Tuesday workouts is usually pretty high, but when we were done with the intervals this week I was under 9 minute pace. I don't ever remember that happening during an interval workout. When we do tempo runs, sure, but not intervals with recovery walk/jogs. I ran 7 miles at 9:10 average and it was fantastic. Over 4.5 miles of that was sub-8 pace.

My Garmin still thinks I'm a fast girl.

I'm running a very hilly half marathon in 4 weeks and I'm going to incorporate this "go all out" attitude. I think it'll be a good race tune up and will tell me where I'm at both physically and mentally 8 weeks out from the marathon. The difficulty of this course is intimidating, and it's not exactly normal to set a personal best on it. But what do I have to lose? Except my breakfast?

Shit is getting real, y'all.