Half marathon training - Week 3 - Tempo run

Today was a little more than just a tempo run. I recently joined a Nike+ challenge with a couple of other people from Flickr. The challenge is called 'The Leprechaun Run', and the goal is to run the fastest 5 miler before St. Patrick's Day. So I decided to make my tempo run my first attempt at winning the challenge. No one had run before me, but I saw after uploading my time that I'm a little over 2 minutes slower than the leader, so I think I'm bound for (hopefully) 2nd place.

As you can see from the graph, I gradually picked up my pace over the 5 miles, with a mile 1 pace of 7:52, and mile 5 pace of 7:11. Overall, it took 38:09, for an average pace of 7:37/mi. I did this on the treadmill after work, with a 1% incline. It was a better time than I had hoped for, so I guess there is hope that I might have a decent showing when I run the St. Malachi Run, a 5 mile race, in 2 weeks. I followed up the run with 10 minutes of hard biking, followed by a 5 minute cool down.