90 minute mid-week run - 8/17

Back to the normally scheduled 90 minute mid week run. They are slowly improving, but this past weekends 20 miles has me somewhat convinced that the benefit of these mid-week runs is not improvement of them from one week to the next, but rather improvement of longer runs. I may look into it, but perhaps I am running these midweek runs at or near the lactate threshold.

Actually, plugging in my Worcester half result (1:53:00 or so) into the vdot calculator at runbayou.com, it comes back telling me my marathon pace is 8:57, which is almost exactly what my pace was during the 20 miler this past week, and that my threshold pace is 8:22, which is very close to what I end up running for various segments on these mid-week runs. Not sure what that all means - maybe it means I'm doing something right for a change, and running based on what I'm capable of rather than trying to run to meet a certain goal (and pushing myself too much). That could explain some of the steady improvement I've been seeing all year.

Not a whole lot to say about todays run, though. My legs were still sore from the legs and back workout yesterday, so in a way I'm happy with todays result, coming off 20 miles a few days ago, and a strength workout from yesterday. I think that was all evidenced a bit by a slightly higher avg HR of 150 today, vs the 145 from a couple weeks ago (yet still better than the 158 from a couple weeks before that - but that was after a particularly intense weekend).