Considering the soreness I was feeling on Sunday after the 20 miler, I'm actually pretty surprised I was able to put in anything more than a slow recovery run today. Most of the soreness in my knee and hips were gone by the following afternoon, and throughout today the only time I felt tightness was if I had been sitting for some time. But then I'd take 10 steps and things would loosen up and feel normal.
So in following the plan, I did about 45 minutes today, with a couple miles at an increased pace. I started off with two miles of warm up at about 8:30 min/miles. During this time, the soreness in my left knee that I felt on Sunday and early in the day on Monday returned. I briefly questioned whether I should just keep a slow pace throughout - but ended up deciding that it was just mild soreness and not in any way painful, so I wouldn't let it interfere.
The next two miles I ran at an average of a 7:35 min/mile pace. The main difference this time was how I ran it. I noticed during the 20 miles that I was able to start specifically using the glutes to help move the legs rearward after being planted down. Today, I tried to continue isolating those muscle movements, and trying to derive some propulsion from those muscles.
What I noticed in the end was that my average HR for those two miles was 167 and 171 respectively. This is a significant drop of 7-10 bpm as compared to the same pace I ran during the Sons of Italy 5 miler the other week. The improvement could have been due to conditioning - as I'm not a sports physiologist, it could be that the idea of garnering propulsion power from my ass is a crock.
Following those two miles, I slowed down a bit and ran the last 1.25 miles about an 8:20 min/mile pace.
Total Time: 43:08
Total Distance: 5.25
Avg HR: 160
One thing is definately true though - these 5.25 mile loops at ~8 min/mile pace average are definately getting easier. It was only a week ago that I did the same loop at 5 sec/mile faster, but with an average HR of 166, whereas today it was 160.
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