Decent Tempo Run and Crappy Long Run

Last week Friday I decided to do my first tempo run since sometime last spring: I did a hard 3 miles along the river. I warmed-up for a mile, stopped and walked around for 90 seconds, and then ran hard from my mile 1 marker to my mile 4 marker:

I'm not running with a Garmin yet (it died in early Sept and I don't have a new one yet), and I knew I'd be running SLIGHTLY long half-miles on this route. So it ended up being nearly a 5K at 3.09 miles. I ran it in 18:09.91, which is 5:52.7/mile based on 3.09 miles. All of my mile splits are slightly long (1.03, 1.04, and 1.02 miles), but I ran descending splits of 6:15, 6:13, and 5:39.

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Then on Monday, I was going to do my first TREADMILL long run in a while. I got up early (before taking the boys to school) and planned on running around 12 miles with the middle 5-6 descending starting at 8.9 mph and speeding up 0.1 mph every half mile. (That's a common winter long run which has me topping out at 10.0 mph [6:00/mile pace] for the final half mile if I do 6 miles.)

It was all going OK at first. It started to feel a little rough as I haven't done a just-slowly-descend-all-the-fast-miles run in a long time. So I capped it at 5 miles of effort in the middle: that ended up being 32:06 for those 5 miles (6:25.2 pace) with descending half mile splits of 3:21, 3:20, 3:17, 3:15, 3:14, 3:11, 3:08, 3:07, 3:06, and 3:03.

But there was another problem. I started yelling upstairs (to the main floor as our treadmill is in the basement) to the boys to make sure they were packing their lunches and eating breakfast before school. But no one was answering me. They BOTH managed to sleep in on the one day I needed at least one of them to wake up - it was 7:20 or so and they usually wake up on their own before 7:00 a.m. I kept yelling upstairs every minute or so to see if someone would answer. But I finally had to hop off the treadmill at 11.0 miles to WAKE THE BOYS UP at 7:35 so I could feed them and get them off to school. Henry ended up eating in the car.

So it wasn't REALLY a "crappy run," but it felt harder than I had hoped (because I hadn't ran like that on a treadmill for a while) and I had to cut the run a mile short (which really isn't THAT big of a deal, but I'd rather cut short any other sort of run instead of my long run). In the end, it was 11.00 miles in 1:17:55 (7:05 ave pace) when I hoped it would more like the previous week's long run of 12.43 miles in 1:26:07 (6:56 ave pace).