Some "Race Pace" Miles

Over the past many years, my long runs contain about 50-70% of their miles at "race pace." It's not a tempo run, but it's hard-ish. For example: if I'm doing a 10 mile run, I might do 5-6 miles at 10 mile race pace. It's not like the END of a 10 mile race, but like the MIDDLE miles. So I don't kick super hard to the finish of the hard miles as I maybe would during a tempo run. I just keep up the pace hard until I ease up for the last few miles.

I did that for my run yesterday. I posted earlier this week about doing a hard run every 2 weeks as I'm starting to add effort back into my workouts (after being injured in August and only starting to run again in mid-March). So here I just wanted to eek in a LITTLE more speed as I just did intervals a week ago. But nothing as hard as a tempo run or intervals.

I ran my regular, boring, easy-to-social-distance course:

I ran easier for a mile, with 1/2 mile splits of 3:34 and 3:35.

Then I picked it up for 2 miles. I had no goals, just "running harder." But NOT tempo speed. I was hoping I'd feel OK keeping it around 6:30 pace (when usually I'm used to keeping these "race pace" miles at 6:00 - 6:20 pace). Those middle 1/2 mile splits were: 3:12, 3:03, 3:14, and 3:09. (So mile splits of 6:15 and 6:23.)

And I finished with over 1.5 miles as a cool down with splits of: 3:48, 3:35, 3:57, and then a bit more.

I looked back in my training log (because I'm stupid). One of my last "regular" long run before getting injured last August was 10 miles, and my "race pace" miles in the middle (5.5 miles in this case) weren't ALL that fast: I averaged 6:30 pace. But then I realized that I ran that pace for that distance WHILE PUSHING A DOUBLE STROLLER. Damn. Well, I still have a lot of work to do! :)