Great day for a run

Had 20 miles on the schedule for today. Normally for 20 miles, there's a 10.2 mile route that I would normally do twice around where I live. I've done this route for the last couple of long runs and it also makes up part of the mid-week general aerobic runs that I've been doing lately. Needless to say, that route is getting very boring. It was such a nice day that I headed downtown to run by the lake. Wore knee-length shorts and a short sleeve shirt underneath a long sleeve MEC thermal shirt which turned out to be just about perfect for the weather. Wish I had brought my camera as there were a couple of pictures that I would have like to have taken.

One logistics problem I had was that the water fountains haven't been turned on yet and there really isn't a good place to buy anything to drink around the 10 mile mark so I tried stashing a drink bottle along the route. I had to drive a bit out of my way to hide the bottle which I did behind a recycling bin. I ended up using a poweraid bottle which has a tamper proof wrapping at the cap since I was afraid that someone might pick it up, open it up and spit/pee in it and then put it back. Yes, I'm paranoid. Anyhow that worked out well. Not sure if this would work in the summer time as i'm sure there would be more traffic around and more likely that someone would see the bottle.

Route can be seen here. I've been using Running Ahead's website this past week and have found that it's much more usable and offers more features than Garmin Connect. I averaged 8:40 pace for 20.3 or so miles. Had some HR monitor problems at the start, but eventually it started working. Tried to keep the HR at just below 160 or so. So a rough estimate is that at a HR of 160 I seem to be able to hold a pace of about 8:30. Looking back at my info from last year, i could maintain 8:30 pace at a HR of 150 and this was in the middle of the summer. I wonder how long it will take me to get back to that point?