Or maybe it depends on how you look at it?
I ran it @ 90 seconds slower than last year. In of itself, that sucks... but it didn't bother me anyway. I ran hard, it felt good to run hard and I knew that my lungs were restricting me from my potential. My legs wanted to go faster.
I can't believe how many times that I just wanted to stop. Anytime I had that thought my legs would seem to carry me a little faster. Well, for a minute or so. But no matter how much I wanted to stop, I didn't seem to get worse as the run continued. My heart rate would seem to confirm this as it was 175, 175, 179 and 177 for the last 3+ miles.
At around the 6k mark, I heard as I was passing between 2 guys, "he needs an inhaler!" or something like that. Hilarious!!!! I did sound asthmatic.
The lucky part was that I finally got in a hard tempo run. My first in over 2 weeks because of this sinus infection from hell. I'll take it. My only "complaint" is that I don't have a very good measure of my fitness for the Cemstone Run for Others 10k in about a month. Would I have been able to do this a minute per mile faster if I hadn't just had my first night of no drugs in 2 weeks? Not a clue!
As you can see there are many "new" runners because with a slightly better than 8 minute pace, I still placed in the top 7% overall
