Two "Normal" Hard Runs!

I've been testing my sore butt. It's been over a month, and I'm at the point of either taking time completely off to let it rest, or pushing it to see how it reacts. It hasn't seemed to be reacting poorly with speed or effort, so I thought I'd try pushing my workouts to be more "normal." And my butt has been handling it well!!

On Monday, I went for a relatively normal long run. It has been a snowy/icy winter so far, so my last "normal" long run was BEFORE THANKSGIVING about 12 weeks ago! (My long runs have been treadmill-bound since then, except for a weird, shorter, loopy long run last week trying to say on "good" sidewalks.) But after some decent temps where the trails melted a bit over the weekend, I headed out on my normal route.

There were icy spots, but nothing too bad. One different thing I did was that I headed down the Greenway for nearly a mile - I was able to mostly find clear spots to stick to there. I hit some bad icy spots near a hill at the turn-around back on River Road, so those were 2 slower splits. But my butt held up and it was a very "normal" long run:

2.5 miles easy, 6 miles harder (including down the
Greenway to the west), and 2.5 miles as a cool-down.

My "harder" miles had a decent descend, with half-mile splits of:

3:19, 3:15, 3:15, 3:08, 3:07, 3:03, 3:11, 3:12, 3:05, 3:08, 3:00, 3:03

= 37:53 (6:18.83/mile pace)

* the back-to-back 3:11 and 3:12 splits were the worst icy spot

In the end, it was 11.11 miles in 1:16:50 (6:54 pace), which was my first run over 10 miles in 5 weeks.

And my hard run on Friday before that was a decent treadmill 5K. I purposely didn't look back to the last time I did this workout because I didn't want to push so hard that I'd crash and burn - this was a TEST workout, and I didn't care if it was close to my best time ever. (And the the last time I did this workout, it WAS my best time ever.)

I knew I'd like to break 18:00, so I wanted to start faster than 6:00/mile and try to speed up. So after warming-up for 1 mile, I went straight into 10.3 mph for about a half-mile, 10.5 mph for about another half-mile, 10.6 mph for about a mile, 10.7 mph around 2 miles in, and then I sped up 2 more times to end at 10.9 mph. My half-mile splits for those treadmill 5K looked like this:

2:54, 2:51, 2:49, 2:49, 2:48, 2:45, 0:33 = 17:32

I felt decent at that pace, and my butt was fine. (I mean, a bit tight as usual for the last 5 weeks, but not sore or painful.)

Garmin pace graph for the run.