Recovery... from... the... long... run...

Today's run: Recovery run of 5 miles at 8:52 pace.
36 miles this week. Marathon is 16 weeks from today!

The purpose of a Recovery run is to set the body right for the next run, primarily before or after (or both) a hard run. Yesterday's run certainly qualified as needing recovery from, since later that day I was pretty tired and definitely felt a bit draggy this morning. From the book:

Recovery runs are relatively short runs done at a relaxed pace to enhance recovery for your next hard workout. These runs aren't necessarily jogs, but they should be noticeably slower than your other workouts of the week.
- Advanced Marathoning

Before this kind of training, a 5 mile run to me started at my house, involved some hills, was run at a demanding pace, and felt like a hard workout. Today, I ran 5 miles in a completely different manner: slowly, leashed by the heart rate monitor, and looking for things to occupy my mind. I took the Mission Loops route again, and zeroed in on a couple of things:

1. The building with the painted indicator of the occupants: Felix F. Schoenstein & Son's Pipe Organs, Established 1877. Art Nouveau-like font, painted in large letters across the facade of the two-story building. Apparently, they are still in business, though Schoenstein and Sons are long gone.
2. The interconnection between the buildings on either side of Florida Street, shown below (courtesy of Google Earth), are two seperate enclosed bridges, coming from one building and connecting it to two different buildings two or three stories overhead. The picture doesn't make clear that the bridges, though eminating from the same area and following the same path, are 100% apart from each other from the moment they exit the building. (My thought is that they could have shared the same path until the two segments diverge, but no!) At some point, I'll have to figure out why they are connected.

The run felt pretty good, and I'm feeling good that I finished this week of training. Next week I'll hit 40 miles, and it features my first Lactate Threshold run, another longest-run-ever, and has me running on five days instead of four.