Vegan Bacon Cheeseburger and I Guess I'm Speedier Than I Thought

Yesterday I met up with Kim at the Ilax Studio for lunch at a local vegan restaurant, Native Foods Cafe. I gave up meet for lent and Kim is vegan so this was a great place for us to enjoy a delicious meatless meal. Based on Kim's suggestion, I went with the:

Vegan Bacon Cheeseburger

And boy was it delicious. If I wouldn't have told you it was vegan, you wouldn't have known. It was THAT GOOD. We had a pact ahead of time to agree to only eat half of our meals and save the rest for later. Uhh, that worked until about 2pm when we both needed a post-lunch "snack" where the rest of our meals were consumed simultaneously. Haha, I guess we were both thinking the same thing! We were so busy eating and talking that we almost forgot to take a photo of us together.

Thankfully we remembered at the last minute before walking back to our respective work places. The weather was so beautiful yesterday, I was very happy to have an excuse to go out and enjoy it! Through our discussions, we decided it would be fun to plan a blogger run/meet up somewhere between the south and northern suburbs. There will be more on this to come! If you're in the Chicago area and interested in finding out about more local bloggers, check out Chicago Running Bloggers!


Wanting to really enjoy the weather, last night I did some speedwork and decided to do it outside instead of on the treadmill. This was a great decision as it truly felt like spring last night!

Pepper followed me around the whole time I was getting ready to leave, and whined the entire time I was gone.

I have never used the "interval" function on my Garmin before and decided to give it a try (ala OuaL). I did 5x400m with a 400m jog in-between. This workout has worked for me in the past so I decided to stick with what works! (Right now my race goal is to break 40:00 for the Shamrock Shuffle.) I was excited about the challenge of running into the wind. Thanks to the beeping of the Garmin, I didn't have to worry about my exact route or focal points at the end of the distance. I just ran until the beep! I didn't know what pace I was running, but I thought it was probably around 7:20 mile pace. Only when I changed the function away from the metric system did I see my actual per-mile splits:

6:37
6:50
6:31
6:39
6:26

Either there is something wrong with my Garmin, or I was going pretty fast. Some of these were into the wind too (although I don't know which ones. I'm guessing the 2nd one). My first thought was OMG I'm running in the 6's... THE 6's?!?!?! This is something I haven't done before, and considering I didn't know my time at all for these splits, they are pretty consistent. I guess all that hill work and long miles has been paying off. I am hoping/thinking my Shamrock Shuffle goal is accomplishable (if these times are in fact correct)... And maybe the sub 23:00 5k is also in my future?! We will see in the months to come I guess! Have you had a workout where you went faster than you thought, without realizing it?