Good Weekend? 2 PRs?

I guess I set 2 PRs this weekend, but have mixed feelings about both.

Winter Flight 8K in Salisbury on Saturday. I used to run this race with my dad in the mid-80s. Haven't run an 8K in over 20 years. I didn't remember this race being so hilly! I did a lot of thinking before the race and felt pretty confident I could run 6:20 miles for a 31:40. First mile was 6:18. After that, there was hill after hill. Long fairly steep ones. Each was about 2:00. The whole last 4 miles I was either going up a hill or recovering from one with the next one in sight. I ended up with a 34:13- 2:33 slower than I expected. 1:30-2:00 of that could be attributed to the hills and :30-1:00 of it could be because I backed off a little (not much) when I knew I'd be slower than I thought. I feel like I kept it steady and hard, but the time is not a very good gauge of fitness due to the course. Results say I was 43rd overall out of 260- top 16%. 4th in my age group. I guess this was a PR. I haven't run an 8K since I was about 13, so... I feel OK about the race. Tried hard but I'm so bad in the hills that it's hard for me to recover before I get to the next one. I ran within myself but it was a hard effort. Here are some pictures.

Sunday, I went to McAlpine with the GPS and ran 50K. I didn't set out to run a PR time, but I did feel bad about how Frosty 50 turned out and an hour into it, I felt good and the average pace was 7:50, so I decided to break my PR of 4:41. I felt good for the first half and averaged 7:55/mile through 15 miles. Then two miles around 8:20 and then crashed. Last half, I averaged 9:09/mile. I guess the good thing is I never dipped to 10:00/mile or below. I was able to keep my running pace to about 8:40/mile with some breaks for water and bathroom. I really felt terrible the last 15. Just felt like sleeping. So tired. I think the weather had something to do with it. All of my long runs in the past 3 months have been at 45 degrees or below. Most in the 30s. I started at 11 AM and it got up to 73 today! Tomorrow's high is back down to 45. Sheesh! Very sweaty & salty. All out in the open at McAlpine. I think it really zapped me.

I ran a 4:27:40, bettering my PR by 14 minutes, but I don't feel great about it. First of all, it doesn't really count since it was by myself, but the main thing is just that I'm worried b/c I felt so bad so early in the run. If I die at mile 15 of the marathon in March, I'm in trouble. Obviously, if I was running a 50K race and expecting to do well, I wouldn't run an 8K race the day before, but I don't think that had a major impact on today's run. My energy level for last weekend's 20 miler wasn't great either. Sleep hasn't been good at all lately. I didn't get more than 4 hours of sleep any weeknight this week. I usually crash Sunday and don't do anything except lay around and run. Both of these long runs were on Sundays. I'll make an effort to sleep better this week and hopefully perk up a bit next weekend. If next weekend's 25 mile training run goes bad, I'll adjust the training plan.