I was scheduled to run 8 miles tonight. It was supposed to start and end with an easy run, and in the middle go to slightly faster than marathon pace. I am still playing with so many running philosophies to see what works. I mixed and matched tonight. John L. Parker has you mixing easy runs and hard runs. So I made tonight a hard run, though I didn’t keep it above 85% ala Parker. I used some Jeff Galloway philosophy by mixing some walking breaks. I started off slow, and quickly sped up to 7mph (8:34 minute miles). Then every 5th minute I dropped the speed to 4mph (15 minute miles) and walked. So I had the faster speeds down to 6.5 mph, then down to 6mph (10 minute miles). I managed to complete the 8 miles in 85 minutes. I think it was the fastest that I have run on the treadmill for any distance. I was excited when I multiplied it out and figured that if I had continued that pace I would have run a 4:40 marathon…that’s a big if. But then I thought about how that it also worked out to a 2:20 half marathon. 2:20? That’s about the same as the 2:21 half marathon I ran last month. But then I never ran this fast on the treadmill before the half marathon. My runs were all much slower. So I will continue to mix some of these faster runs, and hopefully build my speed. Who knows what I will be able to do in December. I am looking forward to my 18 mile run on Sunday. Though I will NOT be running it at this pace. The schedule says a easy pace, 2 minutes slower than marathon pace.
I am still pretty happy with my run tonight. My legs feel pretty good.

Posted by Rob in Running on October 18th, 2006 |