Chillin' with breakfast!

Was going to take a picture of my all singing all dancing fancy new Garmin 900XT watch but decided that daughter number 2 chilling with her feet up in the air while eating her breakfast was a better capture. Perhaps snap the watch tomorrow.

I am running the Great Scottish Run in October and we had talked about trying to do it in a sub 1 hr 45 min which would mean running an average mile pace of between 7'50" to 8'00 minutes. The new watch has a function called Virtual Partner which allows you to set it at a particular pace and you see two little stick men on the screen, one being you and one being the pacer. You can then see if you are on target, in front or behind and adjust accordingly. I set it at 8'00" and managed to come home with an average pace of 7'51". It was good fun chasing the wee chap on the screen down. Now that I have logged this route, I can set the Virtual Partner to run this route next week but this time he (or she) will run with the splits I ran. This has the benefit of taking account of the hills both up and down and gives a more realistic race.

The only problem is that I only ran 6 miles and I was thinking that it would be pretty hard to maintain that pace for the full 13.1 miles of the race. Well, there are a lot weeks still to go to get the miles and the pace up.