After a race like that, do I need the wind?

Today's run: 11 miles of General Aerobic at 8:28 pace

I met Galen downtown to put in 10 miles today. Galen had done a pretty hard run yesterday, as he mentioned in yesterday's comments, and I had done the 10K. So we thought we'd be pretty well matched in our tiredness today.

We took a pretty typical route...

...but we took the route at an atypical time (around 3pm). The result, at least today, was the headwind from hell. I was struggling to keep up pretty much the whole way out, and my heart rate monitor agreed.

However, once we got to the turnaround point, we achieved what Galen had previously described as "running in a vacuum": where the tailwind more or less matches our speed, so we experience no wind resistence and hear practical silence. Before I knew it (but not as soon as Galen predicted), we were moving with more speed.

While we seemed slow going out, we more than made up for it on the way back, as you can see from the top of the page that we had a typical pace overall.

One set of observations: be careful out there, it is tourist season. Tourists seemed to have a knack, today, for not looking where they are going.

• Guy walking across the street, mid-block, not noticing the direction of traffic, or the fact that Galen and I were bearing down on him.
• Woman starting to walk into the street and putting her head into her handbag. I called out and she stopped, allowing us to go by.

Subsequent to today's run: I've been feeling a little achy. I think the past two days deserves a rest day, don't you?