Testing, Testing. 1-2-3

Shook things up a little bit on the fly this morning. I don't know what you call this type of effort, but I think it is somewhere in between tempo and lactate threshold. Perhaps it is called "steady state". Whatever the case I pushed myself a little bit harder than normal and it felt good.

I fell asleep really early last night and woke up at about 4:45am without the need for an alarm. I waited until my alarm went off at 5:10am anyway and then was quite pleasantly surprised to see the outdoor thermometer showing +18C! It also felt like there was no humidity at all, though there was quite a bit of wind.

As I set off on my easy run I decided to start pushing the pace a little bit midway through the third kilometre. After I ran that split in 5:27 (which is not very fast, but I think most of the first half of that split I was still running really slow so the second half I was just getting into a groove) I decided to throw in 10k at something approximating marathon pace effort. I wasn't too sure what the Garmin would say, but I really tried to concentrate on my form and curious to see what the faster turnover did to my heart rate.

The ten splits for the tempo-ish effort looked like this (pace per km and average heart rate for that split):

1. 5:08 (128bpm)
2. 4:49 (138bpm)
3. 4:49 (148bpm)
4. 4:46 (151bpm)
5. 4:53 (154bpm)
6. 4:47 (156bpm)
7. 4:51 (157bpm)
8. 4:47 (159bpm)
9. 4:49 (160bpm)
10. 5:06 (162bpm)

It all averaged out to 4:52.5/km (or about 7:50/mile). The last 6km of this section was run directly into the wind and the last 2km were also uphill (though not a very steep incline). You can definitely tell by that last split that the hill was getting steeper in the very last kilometre! I kept my heart rate in the nice low zone for the first few splits, then it held steady in the low to mid 150s for the while, before making the jump into the low 160s bpm for the last two kilometres. I'd like to be able to run about twice this far at this pace without having my heart rate get much over the mid 150s someday, and I think that will be possible as long as I train smart.

Anyway, I finished off the 15km run with a couple of really easy kilometres and that was it. I am pretty happy with this effort, though perhaps I was a bit more taxed toward the end of the run that I would like to be heading into the marathon. On the plus side I ran this pretty fatigued from the last week of running and weight training, and I still have 50 days before the race. Some more of these types of runs will definitely help, though I have to watch that I don't do too much given how my body breaks down when I run too hard too much.