FAST Long Run!

Monday was a good, hard long run. And it was my first training run "down by the river" since about April - I've been boringly going just down my road and back on runs lately in the name of social distancing, but now that it's getting colder, I figured River Road would be quieter. (And I was right: I only met a few runners during my 8+ miles along the river.)

Here's the 5 mile out-and-back route I did:

Oh, and this run worked a lot better for my Garmin to show my pace by color (something I complained about in Monday's post). Before crossing the bridge around mile 2, I picked up the pace. I ran harder for 5 miles: up to the turn-around and back to just before the bridge. Here's the start of the hard miles (sort of hidden "under" my easier running on the way home) marked wirh the red arrow in the middle, and the end of the hard miles marked on the far left:

Close-up of the end of the hard miles (where it goes from red to dark blue).

I really felt good cranking off those hard miles! That was my first real harder running since my virtual 10 mile race about 3 weeks prior. My half-mile splits through those harder miles were a bit sporadic, but were fast: 3:12, 3:20, 3:12, 3:09, 3:06, 3:08, 3:13, 3:12, 3:12, and 2:59 for a total of 31:43 (or 6:20.60 pace). Of all of my long runs leading up to the 10 mile race, only the last shorter long run had pace miles faster than that! All the rest were 6:30-6:40 range. I was thrilled. It was like I was running like I used to on the route that I used to run on. Pre-COVID. Pre-foot pain. In the good ole' days.

Related to the Garmin "colors" working better: they worked nice on my tempo run yesterday too. Here's a section of "fast" miles, and it shows a blue slow down near the south edge that did NOT actually happen... but I was running past a theatre right there, so maybe the big overhang messed up the signal for a moment:

And then later in that run, it shows pretty clearly where my tempo pace was over and I stopped to walk for 90 seconds:

I labeled it, but it's quite clear by color.

TRAINING SIDE NOTE: My TEMPO runs end really fast with the NEED to stop and walk for a bit before cooling down. But my LONG runs that have some "harder" effort are just that: just "harder" like in the middle of a race. Not the sprint to the finish. The efforts in the middle of my long runs are just about "feeling a pace" and then easing up when that pace work is done. It's not nearly as hard as tempo runs. On my own pseudo made-up 7-step effort scale, the harder part of long runs are a 5, and the hard miles in a tempo run are a 6 or 6+.