Eight miles at race pace this morning ... plus warmup and drills ... sounded like three laps of a 5K course to me. It's raining, I don't have a traffic-free place to do a hard run of that distance, I wanted a change of scenery, and most of all I wanted the motivation of other runners for the last 5K when it would've gotten hard had I been alone.

I should've timed the start pretty well, but they were way late in starting, so I had a break of almost 9 minutes in the middle of my run. I don't know how much that scr*ws up the workout.

Small race, especially in this weather, so even being good and running it at marathon pace I won my AG. Maybe I'll be lucky and have so little competition next week, when I'm doing a half marathon as my tempo run.