7.25 miles tempo

Dodged training on Tuesday in order to recover in time for a planned 600m at Grangemouth on Wednesday, then ended up not feeling well enough to do it. Having to drive 70 miles in the rain for such a short race wasn't much of an incentive either. However I felt much better after the extra day off and tackled the scheduled 8-mile club run although there were shorter options. Tonight there were only 3 in the fast pack. The pace for the first 3 miles was comfortable enough to maintain a conversation, but between 4 and 5 miles it picked up a bit, and I finally got dropped at about the 6 mile mark as we were passing through Westerton. That wasn't unexpected and would still have been a reasonable evening's work, but on the long hill at the top of Maxwell Avenue I managed to make up all the ground I had lost and moved back to the front of the pack, where I was able to hang on this time. The pace increased further over the last 400m or so but I picked it up well enough and finished a close second. Definitely not the advertised 8.3 miles judging by my finishing time (48:49) and confirmed by Debs' GPS.