3+ miles @ ~10 min/mi

CM and I rendezvous at parking lot XX1 on the UM campus near Paint Branch Trail, shortly before 6pm. Her pace plan is what she calls "Descending": start off slow and then accelerate for three miles. (I would have called that "Ascending"!) The weather is warm but not too humid, with an intermittent nice breeze. We walk to milepost 1.5 behind an engineering building and commence the fun downstream, with a 10:49 mile, too fast as usual. After going a fractional mile to join the Lake Artemesia loop we find ourselves blasting along counterclockwise while fast young buff runners nevertheless pass us. Maybe they lure us into our second mile-plus at what my watch and the painted markers suggest was 9:16(!) pace. In spite of pushing hard on the trip back upstream we can only make the last mile in 9:27. As our pulses race I think of Mark Anthony's lines, "My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar, And I must pause till it come back to me." (Julius Caesar, act III, scene ii) We walk half a dozen minutes to recover, then agree that we've gotta try it again — some day! — with better pace control next time.

(correlates: SituationalStrategy, 2007-09-17 - Artemesia Dusk, PleasantSurprises, ...)