Speed work

On my training schedule for yesterday was a "tempo run." I have never done any sort of speed work before, so these kinds of runs are new to me.

I guess the way it was supposed to work was this:

1 Mile easy 
2 x 1 mile repeat (tempo pace is 11:40 to 12:30 
take 3 minutes recovery either walking or trotting) 

How it ended up looking was slightly different.

Hubs and Daughter at the end of the run.

The Hubs and daughter came along for the run. I tried to run slowly for the first mile, but it's really hard to run slow when your Husband can walk faster than your slow pace. So I went slow-ish, ending up with a 12'40" average pace for the first mile.

I was using the nike+ app for the first time in a long time, because I could figure out how to get it to give me pace feedback every minute, unfortunately, it was only giving me average pace for the whole run. Not very useful when I'm trying to hit specific pace targets for different miles.

Anyways, I hit one mile and cranked the speed. The feed back started ticking down, until it was giving me a pace around 12'20". I was feeling awful, because it felt like I was pushing really hard to maintain the pace, which sounded really slow. For reference, I'm in the 12 minute pace group in my training group. I shouldn't have been pushing that hard for a 12'20" pace. Spoiler, turns out I wasn't.

At two miles, I took my walk break, and forgot to pause my workout. So it caused havoc on my pace. When I started my run back up, it kept giving me paces in the 13's, then in the 12'50" range. So I kept pushing it, trying to bring my pace down. I kept thinking that I must be really off today, since this pace felt so hard. Right at the end I completely ran out of gas and let my pace taper off until I hit three miles.

Turns out I was running really fast. The splits showed up as 11'23" for mile two and 12'54" for mile three (with the walk break.) Looking at the nifty pace graph on the website, I was hitting speeds around 10'50" a lot, with my fastest pace around 10'14". Yikes. No wonder I was sucking wind.

With the information to reframe it, it was a great run. The temperature out was much more comfortable, and I wasn't dying by the end of the run. I'm not sure how successful i was at a tempo run, since I think I was doing my intervals a little fast.

I've since bought the paid version of the mapmyrun app, which will give me (hopefully) a more accurate picture of my pace when I run. I know that eventually I'm going to have to cave and get a watch of some sort, but I'm just not ready to invest that kind of money right now.

I've got another short, easy run tonight, and then a long run saturday morning.

I'm having a rough time adjusting to the increased number of runs a week, even though most of the runs are shorter, so my total weekly milage is right around where it was pre-half. I'm really looking forward to my rest day on .... monday...yikes.