6 miles with 3 miles tempo - 8/30

The past few days I've been thinking about my approach to training and trying to think of ways to refine it. Seems like this happens every so often as I learn more and my capabilities change as time passes. Or maybe thats just what I tell myself to justify altering a regime that has been working.

Long story short, I decided I want to maintain doing a tempo run once per week. However I had to shift my training schedule around slightly, and it seemed like doing the tempo run on Tuesday, and pushing the legs workout to Saturday, was the best option. Since I probably won't be doing any 20 mile runs or 100 mile bike rides for the rest of the season, and concentrating more on the quality of the outings, I should be able to manage a strength session after the days endurance workout.

Last week I did this run and sorta made things up as I went along. Get going, decide on trying to maintain about 160 for a while, and mid-tempo-run decide that 3 miles was enough. This time I was more measured about it. I knew I wanted to keep the tempo time around the 20-25 minute mark, so 3 miles was good. But I wanted to really try and peg 160 during that stretch, and in order to do that, I'd have to warm up first. So this time the goal was a one mile warm up, nice and easy and not paying attention to pace. Then 3 miles at a HR of 160 (about 10-15 bpm faster than what I do my LSD runs at). I had no particular reason at going for that HR except that I felt like it was something I could maintain for that period of time without going too far. Then, the last two miles would be at more of a recovery HR, about 145-150 or so.

So thats what I did. It seemed to have worked out pretty well - the first mile definitely gave my HR a chance to settle into a workout pace, so it quickly went up to 160 at the conclusion of the first mile. I managed to stick to 160 pretty closely, slowing down a bit when necessary, speeding up when necessary, to maintain that intensity. And having a < 8 min/mile pace during that doesn't suck either.

The tricky thing is figuring out what that all means. During the Worcester half, my average HR was 163 - so the initial thought is that perhaps that HR of 160 is what my half marathon intensity pace should be, even though the pace would likely slow over time. I'm not sure if that slowing pace over time means that the HR of 160 is actually still a little too intense for my proper half marathon pace, though. But either way, I'm not about to attempt 160 for the full marathon, instead probably staying closer to the 145-150 bpm that I've been doing the 20 mile runs at.