Even though it wasn’t my coldest run of the winter (that was in Michigan over Christmas), it did turn out to be a pretty chilly morning with a starting temperature of 20º and a “feel’s like” of 12º …
As a follow-up to last Tuesday’s 40-minute tempo run, today we planned to have 50 total minutes of tempo work, broken up into 3 individual segments. Nathan and I met in Percy Warner Park and did our warmup over to the Nature Center in Edwin Warner Park where we met up with Paxton. From there we did all of our tempo repeats out and back on the Harpeth River Greenway.
Since Paxton is still working his way back from a long layoff, Nathan and I did all 3 segments together and then joined back up with Paxton at the end of each so we could start together.
The following is a rundown of the workout along with our average pace for each segment.
- 20-Minute Warmup (9:00 avg pace)
- 20-Minute Marathon Pace (7:08 avg pace)
- 10-Minute Half Marathon Pace (6:39 avg pace)
- 20-Minute Marathon Pace (7:08 avg pace)
- 20-Minute Cool Down (9:27 avg pace)
Even though this was a very challenging workout, overall I felt fantastic! For “Marathon Pace” we were shooting for 7:05 to 7:10 pace, so this was spot on, and very consistent. For “Half Marathon Pace” we were shooting for 6:45 to 6:50 pace, so this part was a little fast. However, the goal of this segment was to tire out our legs, and then try to maintain a consistent pace for the last marathon pace repeat.
My biggest problem was with my toes going numb. We had a standing 2min recovery in-between each segment, and I used that time to go into the Nature Center bathroom (which is heated) to try and get feeling back into my toes.
Once we finished the tempo segments, Paxton joined us for part of our cool down run back to Percy Warner before heading back to his car at the Nature Center. In total Nathan and I finished with 11.75-miles in just over 90-minutes of work.
Beast Mode…ON!