New Route, Limitations Understood

Last night, I had a great run. Not my longest ever, but a really good run. I did 8 miles and my pace was 9 minutes per mile. I stopped twice: once to pee and once because it's a new route and I got slightly lost and confused. Had I done neither of those things, my time would have been closer to 8:45 per mile, I think. But when you gotta go, you gotta go.

The new route is killer. It's an almost 2-mile loop on a residential street with great visibility. I never ever felt like I was in danger and that's cool.

Here's a map of the route:

The loop is pretty obvious. I run counter-clockwise. All runners run counter clockwise. I don't know why that is. E represents home. I only run that little leg to and from the loop.

I learned pretty definitively that 8 miles is my soft limit for short runs. Let me see if I can explain that.

Good socks are expensive. Cheap socks are cheap. For short runs, I run in cheap socks. But after about 7 miles, the socks hurt my "ring" toes, if you get my meaning. Expensive socks are made of wool and don't hurt at all, but I can only do so much laundry, so I save the good socks for runs greater than about 8 miles.

Next, I run out of fuel at about 8 miles. I can keep going after that, but it's absolutely no fun. I need to pick up some gels to down at about miles 6 and 10 to keep me going.

Mind you, for once I'm not complaining. Oh, I could complain about it, but I now know a legit limit, why it's a limit, and how to get past it. Which sounds like a success to me.