Colon Cancer 15k

To make a long story short I had a 9 mile run scheduled for Sunday as part of my 1/2 Marathon training schedule. I figured I'd run the 15k as a training run to get in my 9 qualifying races for NYC '09 Marathon. Well I didn't quite run it as a training run and didn't quite run it as a race. I figured to make sure I'd run it long and slow I lined up in the 10mm corral. As the gun went off we walked to the starting line which felt unusually long..at least 5 minutes to get there. Crossing over the carpet I hit my watch and was off. Was moving with the 10mm group (which felt somewhat slow) and as it turned out my first mile split was like 10:30. I picked up the pace just moving along with the crowd and kind of started to get into it, nothing overt or heavy. The balance of my runs were done at about 9:30 pace..mostly negative splits. Bottom line was this was the fastest I've run 9 miles without racing. I think had I wanted to I could have run the nine miles faster than 9:09 pace. This is significant to me because if I can maintain this pace for 26.2 miles then I will have accomplished one of my intermediate goals of running a marathon in less than 4 hours. (Yes I do want to finish my first marathon but this is a nice sub goal). The downside was my Tuesday 4 miler was horrible, slow and painful. The race was great fun though even though I didn't "race".