This would be a good thing and a great accomplishment as a beginning runner training for my first road race. However, neither am I a beginning runner nor am I training for my first road race. But, those things aside, this could be commendable if I was actually going for a slow run. In fact, most training plans call for Long Run’s to be done at/around your Easy Pace, but my Training Plan calls for all of my Long Runs to have quality (faster, pre-determined speed) runs in them. Happily, I didn’t have any problem with the quality of today’s training run.
When I started running this morning, I took a glance at my watch, and saw a ‘10’ in the minute-per-mile block, I was pretty shocked. I started to think that today’s run might actually be a waste. The ‘non-quality’ portions of today’s run should have been run at either a moderate or easy pace (9:20-9:25/9:40-9:45) but I could not get the times below that dreaded 10min/mile for the first few miles. Odd. I figured if I couldn’t run easy at 9:xx how could I do sprints and strides? But my uphill strides came through really well. Odd; why would running fast be really easy but running slow be hard? So, I continued with the workout and began the section for flying sprints. Again, spot on! The running felt relatively easy. Oh well, I kinda gave up thinking about it. After all, I’ve still got some Marathon Effort coming up.
My Coach wanted me to do 30-45 minutes worth of Marathon Effort running. She took special note to make sure that I knew to run on effort not pace. Cool. For training, she defines “Marathon Effort” as: “moderate hard but comfortable, breathing is labored but able to continue pace for an hour or more in training” (not to be confused with tempo runs). I figured I’d start out around 9:00 min/mile and adjust for the feeling of what I could hold for this length of running. Let’s back up a bit. How much of this was I gonna do? 30 minutes or 45 minutes, some undetermined distance (because I'm a rebel)? It worked out that I was ready for this part of the workout right before the 10 mile mark. I decided to run through until either 13 miles or 30 minutes, which ever came last. I managed to get in a little over 4 miles with an average of ~8:54 min/mile. BTW, the 13 miles came last. I finished the workout thinking that I could have (maybe even wanted) to put in more miles. That is the right way to leave a workout…I think???
Upcoming workouts:
Monday, 28 June
3 miles easy
Tuesday, 29 June
4 miles easy
Wednesday, 30 June
8 miles moderate with 4 x (1mile @ HM Effort followed by 400m @ 5k effort)
Thursday, 1 July
Rest (or 2-3 recovery miles)
Friday, 2 July
3 miles easy
Saturday, 2 July
16 miles moderate with 4 x Strides, 10 x Sprints, then 5 x 200m, 3 miles at LT-HM Effort, finish with 5 x 200m
Sunday, 2 July
2-3 recovery miles
"Man imposes his own limitations, don't set any"
~Anthony Bailey
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