Christmas Day "Winter" Long Run

On Christmas morning, I headed out for a long run. Only it wasn't snowy and bright... it was rainy and in the mid-40s on the way to a high in the 50s. I had a hat and mittens if I got too cold, but they were all off early on in the run: I was running in shorts and a thin long-sleeve shirt.

In other words, it was a great day for a non-winter run in late December in MN!

Lots of people have been posting similar sentiments lately:

I wasn't feeling fast after a weekend of eating crap at Christmas parties, but my 2.5 mile warm-up didn't feel horrible. When I started my faster "pace miles" in the middle of this run (I was shooting for 6 harder/faster miles), I descending the first few nicely, and got under 3:00/half mile quite early in the run! My first half-mile splits of the harder miles were 3:10, 3:07, 3:05, and 2:59! My next half mile split didn't continue the descend, but it was up 1 of the 2 biggest hills of these harder miles, and it "slowed" just to 3:00! I wasn't sure I'd last all 6 miles, but I was happy with this effort.

I hit my 3rd "harder" mile with that 3:00 split and a 2:58 for 18:20 through 3 miles (6:06.7 pace). The goal at that point was to see if I could hit the last 3 harder miles in about the same time (and keep my 6 pace miles under 37:00, which would be 6:10 pace).

In the 2nd half, I couldn't get my splits back down to sub-3:00 until my final half mile, but I didn't bleed too much time: my last 3 miles had half-mile splits of 3:03, 3:03, 3:01, 3:06, 3:04, and 2:57 for a final 3 harder miles of 18:17, which was 6 "pace" miles in 36:37, or 6:06.17/mile pace!

That may have been my fastest winter long run ever! In January (11 months ago), I snuck away to Florida for a long weekend with my brothers-in-law and had a great long run with 6 "pace" miles in 37:08 (6:11.3/mile). And the overall pace faster this week as compared with 11 months ago as well: 12.04 miles in 1:21:09 (6:44 pace) this week vs. 12.17 miles in 1:24:24 (6:56 pace) in Florida last winter. This was faster, and in Minnesota. (But a WARM Minnesota.)

"Pace" miles from split 5 to split 17 (half-mile splits).
Note the dark blue slow-down at the upper left after the pace miles!


45 degrees when I started, about to rain later in the day.


Post-run. No snow in sight... for now.

Let's keep this strong running going!...

p.s. One thing that could have helped this run be faster was that it was after sunrise. Almost all of my runs since late September have been in the dark, and there are plenty of areas of River Road that don't have working streetlights right now (copper thieves). So there's a chance I was faster because I could see where my foot was landing.