First "Good" Outdoor Long Run of 2022

After dropping off the boys at school on Monday morning, I tweeted this:

My last long run 8 days before that was a bit shorter because I was coming off some harder workouts and didn't want to hurt anything. So THIS was my first real outdoor "test" to see what all of those treadmill long runs have done to me over the winter.

My warm-up miles were faster than the treadmill (they almost always are), and then I wanted to do 6 faster miles. On the treadmill, I start easier and then speed up, and I find myself doing that a lot outside as well. After 3 perfectly descending half-mile splits (3:18, 3:16, and 3:14), I was worried I wasn't running fast enough, so I posted a 3:04 as my next split. I felt good turning around half way though those fast miles with splits leading up to the turn-around of 3:07 and 3:05.

My splits coming back were just bouncing around, with a 3:07 split turning up with 1.5 miles left that made me think I should focus more and push a bit harder. My last 3 splits were 3:04, 2:58, and 2:58. Here were my 6 miles "at pace" in the middle of the run:

3:18, 3:16, 3:14, 3:04, 3:07, 3:05, 3:08, 3:02, 3:07, 3:04, 2:58, 2:58 = 37:26 (6:14.33/mile pace)

After a 2.5+ mile cooldown (that was also not as slow as I cool down on the treadmill), I finished with 11.32 miles in 1:16:11 as I showed in my tweet:

19 degrees felt pretty good!


Fast from split 5 to split 17, obviously (the west side of the river).

So my "pace" miles weren't quite as fast as they've been lately on the treadmill: this run was 37:26, and my last 3 treadmill runs were 37:13, 37:14, and 37:15 (6:14 pace this week vs 6:12 pace in the last 3 "pace miles" on long runs). But my time to get to mile 8.5 (the warm-up through the pace miles) was a lot faster this week: 55:26 this week vs 55:59, 56:09, and 56:12 in my last 3 long treadmill runs. So overall I was faster outside. (My 11.32 mile outside run was just 18 seconds slower than a treadmill run that was 11.50 miles - 6:44 vs 6:50 overall pace.)

Hoping I can keep this up! AND fit a race into my schedule shortly!