Cresting the wave

Today I ran to work. The plan called for a marathon pace effort. I think I overdid it a bit. Either that or my next marathon will be fast. At 4:54m/km, my marathon time would be about 3h33m. I don't think I can sustain this speed for a whole marathon yet but who knows, with the crowds cheering, maybe I will speed it up :)

Today's run was very pleasant. I always like longish tempo runs. It feels like at the beginning of the run, I am pushing hard to get a good groove going. Once the groove is established, I feel like I am being pushed by the established pace to keep it up and continue doing well. The image that came to my mind today was a surfer cresting a wave, totally in control, riding the wave to the beach. That is how I felt today, totally in control of my machinery and riding the wave I created in the first kilometers all the way to downtown. What a pleasant feeling. The Endorphins were really flowing freely today. Then, toward the end of the run, something funny happened. The Testosterone came out and I started thinking about the Ottawa Marathon, my next race in about a month. Some of you may have seen my tweet after finishing the run, proclaiming that @ottawamarathon has nothing on me. I felt invincible and right then and there thought that I would shred the course apart. Even if the new course hasn't been finalized, I feel that I will do well on May 30th.

The pace itself was fairly consistent, staying between 5:00 and 4:40 once I warmed up.
I've been using both my Garmin and MyTracks from Google on my new phone. Preliminary thoughts are that the voice feedback is fun. It mixes in with the music playing in my BlueTooth headset and feels fairly non-intrusive. However, it's not the best way to see progress in between updates and there's no way it offers as much info as the display on the Garmin. The phone screen is somewhat hard to see in the sun and since it's up on my arm, almost on my shoulder, it's not as easily accessible as a watch. Accuracy is pretty good with about 5% difference between the mileage recorded by the Garmin and the phone. It wouldn't be my only tool but as a secondary/backup device it works well enough. It doesn't offer all the workouts and other advanced features of the Garmin but that's probably just Software related. If someone could come up with a watch like accessory and maybe heartbeat and footpod that works with BlueTooth then maybe we could talk about serious competition. I'll keep looking for other apps and eventually write in a in-depth review / comparison of all of them :)