40 minutes run - 5/13

This morning I was still a little bit sore from Sundays events, so I initially thought that maybe I'd take an extra day of rest and not run this evening - especially since I am figuring on doing intervals later this week. By the time I got home though, I considered the concepts in a training program - the alternation of stress and rest. A hard day is followed by a day of rest, but later on in the program, hard weeks are followed by lighter weeks. So it occured to me that I could apply the same concept here - have a hard week this week(triathlon and long run on Sunday, fast tempo run today, intervals on Thursday), and then have an easier week next week, when Sundays run is 5 miles.

So thats what I did - today I ran the 5 mile loop at a fast pace, looking to see how I'd compare to the time I ran the loop last year when I did sub 8 min/miles for the entire 5 miles. As I passed the first mile, I was somewhere near the 8:10 min mark, but by the time I passed the 2 mile mark, I realized that I had run a sub 8 min/mile for that second mile. Whats more, while it was uncomfortable - I also realized that I could likely sustain that level of effort for the rest of the run. So as I passed each mile mark, I found I was maintaining around a 7:50 min/mile pace. It gradually got more difficult - but interestingly enough it wasn't quite as hard as the first time I ran the loop at a sub 8 min/mile pace, and not as hard as the hilly St Patricks day race earlier this year.

Total Distance: 5.25 miles
Total Time: 41:29
Avg HR: 168

The HR is not too much of a surprise - I would expect that it would be in the high 160 range for this pace. If anything, I'm a little surprised it actually wasn't more like 172 or 173 - especially because it was just about always > 170 whenever I looked. However, I'm positive that if the overall average were that high, I would have been much more fatigued and it would have been mentally much tougher. On the other hand, comparing to the time I ran this loop last fall, my HR was slightly lower then at 166.