Wednesday, August 3, 2016

So, that marathon training thing

That officially started a few days ago. So far so good.

Monday, run 8 k 57:45. This was to be easy. No, easier than that. Except my legs were insistent on running about a 7 min K pace, slower going up out of Fish Creek, then falling back into that pace. Breathing was easy, and trying to run slower wasn't working so well.

Tuesday. Swim 500 m easy, getting back into the swim groove.  20 minutes of water core. For my newer readers you can read about it here.

Wednesday. The plan called for a warmup run of 2 or 3 K, and a cool down the same, with 6K of tempo run at half marathon pace, which is sort of about 6:30 to 6:40. It turns out the outside lane at Talisman is 224 m long, which is an awkward number of laps per K, but 9 laps is 2.16 k, rounded to 2.2. Close enough. 9 laps per interval, 1 interval warmup, 3 of tempo run, 1 of cool down. I can keep track of that sort of stuff.

I deliberately set the phone so I wouldn't hear the data chirps. I wanted to run by feel, and look at the numbers after. Warmup pace turned out to be 6:56, running what seemed to be really slowly. I was barely breathing, and hardly popped a sweat in the warm muggy Talisman tent.

Interval 2 was 5:56 pace. 3 was 5:48 pace. All this was running smoothly, breathing evenly, feeling comfortable. Interval 4 says 5:36, but I wasn't trying to run any faster. I suspect that some of the time should come off interval 3 and get added to 4, the distances are a bit funny.

Interval 5, cool down was 6:35 pace and it felt like I was going to break into a walk. Not that my legs were tired. My breathing completely recovered, the sweat started to dry off, and it felt like I was running really slowly. Not a plod, my feet felt really light. Walked another 2 laps to cool down some more.

Overall was 11 k, 1:09. Really pleased. Why indoors you ask? Morning thunderstorm. Not thrilled about rain, but can cope. Ain't made of brown sugar! I do not want to be out running when there is lightning. I thought about waiting, but if it rains in Calgary it's usually in the afternoon. I figured get'er done. It turns out that if I'd waited till 7, I'd have had a warm run, but then I probably wouldn't have slept well. Exercise wakes me up.

Here's some of the flowers before the most recent hailstorm.






2 comments:

  1. Your paces are so fast now! Love it!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Gosh, you're getting faster in a hurry. My one piece of advice would be to be careful you don't overdo it. Upping your pace and mileage at the same time can be risky. Save your speed work for shorter workouts and focus on doing long runs at a truly easy pace.

    ReplyDelete

Looking forward to reading your comment!