Day 77 - 11 weeks complete

The sun was out and it made for a beautiful spring day. By 4:00pm the temperature was 77 degrees - a perfect coincidence for my 77 day running streak.

With the 10 miler just two and half weeks away, I'm starting to think about a reasonable time for finishing. I of course want to finish faster than the 117th place time of 68:25 I ran last year. I'm way ahead on mileage for the year, but my average pace has been significantly slower. But last year, the longest run I had done was only 6 miles and I've already completed runs of 10.5 and 12.2 this spring. So I don't expect the endurance to be a problem, just leg turnover.

I know it is too late to really make much of a difference for the race, but I am now trying to run faster on my normal runs. Today, I did another fartlek interval workout. Instead of short bursts, today I focused on running fast for 7:00 minutes at a time. I started with a 5 minute warm-up, and then sped up to what felt like race pace for 7 minutes. When my watched beeped again, I slowed to a recovery pace, probably around 8 minute miles, and slowly built back up to normal pace over the next 7 minutes. When the watch beeped again, I went right back to race pace for another 7 minute interval. Today I only ran two fast 7 minute stretches, then cooled down for another 6-7 minutes. As I get stronger, I'll increase the number of intervals and hopefully get faster.

15s workout

Today I added some speed work to my running. I haven't done anything fast all year (including the race I ran on Jan 1) and my average workout pace shows it. I didn't feel like driving out to the track today so I decided I would do an interval run. I set my watch up to beep every 15 seconds and set out for a 5 minute warm-up. At exactly 5 minutes, I picked up the pace to run as fast as I could maintain for 15 seconds and when the watched beeped, I would return to normal pace for 45 seconds. I then repeated this routine every minute until I was about 3 minutes from the finish and could cool down. Today, that meant I ran 18 repeats. By the end, I was not fully recovering between intervals, but I wasn't completely dead either. The key was to make sure my recovery pace wasn't too slow or the workout will end up taking longer than a normal run. I think I did pretty good today - I finished in 25:51 compared to 25:45 on Thursday for the same run at normal pace.

As I get stronger, I'll switch to 20 seconds of speed and only 40 seconds of recovery and really concentrate on the keeping the recovery pace. Hopefully after a few weeks of this, my speed will start to improve.

Today's Run 3.6 miles (YTD 251 miles)
Today's time 0:25:51 (YTD 32:32:58)
Weekly mileage 35.6 miles