Since we didn’t do a tempo workout yesterday, the schedule today called for…
- 15-min easy
- 20-min at 6:30 to 6:45 pace
- 10-min easy
- 20-min at 6:30 to 6:45 pace
- 15 to 20-min easy
Nathan and I met at 5am at the Edwin Warner Park Nature Center so that I would be able to get back in time to go with Kate to her first day of second grade. After two consecutive runs with lower than normal humidity, today it was back with a vengeance, and it seemed to just suck the life out of me.
It was weird running our warmup and first tempo interval in the dark after several months of mostly running after sunrise. Neither of us brought a headlamp, so I had to be a little cautious with my footing and there were several times where we had to dodge posts in the middle of the greenway.
We took the 15-minute warmup very easy on the Harpeth River Greenway, and then continued on down the greenway for a 10-minute out-and-back for our first interval. On the way out it was a struggle to keep my pace at 6:45 or under, and by the time we started back it had drifted just above 6:50. Secretly I was hoping it was just my watch having GPS issues again, but Nathan confirmed that we were hovering right around 6:50 on his watch as well.
About 3/4 of the way through the segment I could no longer hang with Nathan and let him go. Over the final five minutes my average pace continued to rise, and I finished with a 6:56 average pace for the first interval. This was obviously quite a ways off from the target pace. The funny thing was that I didn’t feel overly bad, I just didn’t have the extra gears to go fast like I normally do.
We did our 10-minute recovery in the park, and then headed back to the greenway for the second interval. Just before we started I told Nathan to go on without me, because I was going to modify my pace based on how I felt. I was hoping to at least maintain goal marathon pace (7:05), but this also felt fast today. It didn’t take long for Nathan to be completely out of sight, because he was flying.
Again, I didn’t feel awful, but just didn’t have the umpf to maintain a faster pace. At the turnaround point my average was around 7:25 for the segment. Early on during trip back I started feeling a little burst of energy and picked up the pace a bit to finish out the second segment with a 7:13 average. When I saw Nathan at the finish, he said that he had maintained a 6:35 average for the final interval. That is pretty impressive in the nasty humidity.
We finished up with an easy 18-minute cool down back to our cars. In total I completed 10.3-miles with an average pace of 8:12 per mile. After downloading my Garmin I noticed that my heart rate never went above 171 during the 20-minute tempo segments, and my average heart rate for those segments was in the low 160s.
This actually made me feel a lot better, because it helps explain why I didn’t feel really bad even though I didn’t have the extra gears today. I’m glad that my issue was not with controlling my heart rate, but instead just overall leg fatigue mixed in with some tough humidity. Since I just had a great workout on Saturday, I know this was just a normal blip in the midst of tough training. Looking forward to bouncing back with authority over the remainder of the week.
Beast Mode…ON!