The rest really paid off!  Today I felt really strong.  I decided that since speed has been my nemesis throughout this process, I would just concentrate on doing the 4.1 miles as fast as I could, but not necessarily at 7 mph if I couldn’t maintain that.

I started out at about 4 mph, but went very quickly up to 5, where I held it for a while, but I went up to 6 pretty quickly, too.  Before long, I found myself hanging out at around 6.4, then 6.7, and then it occurred to me that 6.7 wasn’t terribly less than 7, and that I might even be able to attempt doing 7.  One problem, though, I didn’t have all the time in the world to get this run done, so I couldn’t just start counting the miles when I got it up to 7 and see if I could do all 4.1 at that speed, so I just didn’t worry about it, when suddenly, my music made me want to go faster, so I bumped it up to like 7.3 and then that still didn’t really fit with the beat right, so I did like 7.6 and that was just nuts.

About that time, the music really started kicking up and I just ran the speed up to like 8, but at that speed, I didn’t really have control of the buttons I was pushing, so it ended up being more like 8.3 and I still felt like going faster, so I ran it up to 9 mph, which was just insane!  I started to think I was gonna go flying off the stupid thing and make a complete idiot of myself there at the gym, so I put it back down to like 7, which seemed like a slow speed at that point.

So, I did 7 for a while, then went up again to 7.3 and 7.5 and 7.6 and I tried another little stint at 8 or 8.5, I don’t remember, but it was pretty short-lived and I was back down to 7 again.

In any case, I finished the 4.1 miles in 36:49, which averages to 6.68 mph, which is pretty good, considering I had pretty much given up on the speed component.  If I had had another half-hour today, I could have done it!