Thursday, April 21, 2011

One last tempo run

As I mentioned Tuesday, I've been substituting tempo runs for other types of speed work for the last few weeks. This afternoon, I ran my last tempo run before Big Sur. I still can't quite believe that I'll be getting on a plane for California just one week from tomorrow!

The plan was to run 4 miles at a 7:30 pace, with a warm-up and cool-down. Chad, Christie, Joe, and I met at the CVS at 6 p.m. for a trail run. I didn't think anyone wanted to run as fast as me, so I ran with the group at an easy pace for two miles, then took off.

As usual for me, the first mile of the tempo section was a little on the quick side, 7:13. I was pretty tired at this point. I tried to slow things down for Mile 2, and ended up slowing down a little too much: 7:55. However, I think this is a section that the Garmin measures short (see this post), so my pace was probably actually about 7:40. Mile 3 was 7:34, and Mile 4, with a steep uphill finish, was 7:41. Overall my pace (without adjusting for Garmin error) was 7:36 for the 4 tempo miles. Then I slowed down for an abbreviated cooldown, a little less than a mile into town, and met back up with the group.

In my experience, the trails add at least 15 seconds a mile to your time, so the equivalent road pace would have been about 7:20. Perhaps I took these miles a little too fast! I guess we'll find out on tomorrow's run, which will be another easy recovery run.

Details of today's run are below:


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