Feeling stronger the past couple of weeks. My last post was 12/12/15 so it's been about a month. Grandma's marathon on June 18 is now nearly 23 weeks away. I've got my hotel and registration taken care of needs flights and a car for now.
Morning weight/sleep:
- Weight: around 168. I've been slowly floating back down from 172 during the holidays
- Sleep: I've been going to bead after midnight and waking up at 7:30 lately. 6 hour/day average
Today's Plan: 11 miles of hills and trails
Yesterday's Plan: 8 x 400 @ 10K (6:15) pace
Actual: For these I opted to do the Sorrento Valley road "Pump Station 65" route. There are markers on the ground that *somebody* needs to re-paint and/or re-measure and paint. 100 - 1000M
Conditions: Perfect - 60 with a light wind
How it felt: Felt sluggish for the first few, then I got the point that I "need to run fast" and picked it up. At first I was thinking of how I used to feel running 40 min 10Ks (not too hard) and then how I "blew up" at the Kook10K a few years back when I went through the first mile at 6:15 and then basically ran in at 7:30 up the hill. Here's how it looked on Strava:
Here's the actual Garmin Connect measured times for the 400s. They have "actual time" and then "moving time" and list the two speeds side-by-side on their system. I assume that they average the speed while i'm in both. This is more of a bicycle feature I think as you always have to stop for lights on bike rides. I'm going to use the "actual" where i hit the start/stop button on the watch...which has the computed speeds for each 400 (0.25 miles really) as follows:
1. 6:47
2. 6:37
3. 6:39
4. 6:19
5. 5:58
6. 5:55
7. 6:03
7. 5:48
hardly consistent, but I guess that's the point. getting the feel of running at the correct speed, or what i'm aiming for, "making 6:15 seem tolerable" for a few miles so that I can run a sub-40 or thereabouts.
Finally, here's the paces of my Monday (or Mon/Tue if I skipped Monday) runs since I turned 55 on 11/16/15
11/16 - 6.2 miles @ 8:39
11/23 - 6.2 miles @ 8:42
12/2 - 6.2 miles @ 8:10
12/7 - 4.2 miles @ 8:16
12/14 - 8.1 miles @ 8:22
12/21 - 8.0 miles @ 8:09
12/28 - 8.8 miles @ 8:16
1/11 - 10.1 miles @ 8:25
Beginning in December I basically dropped about 30 secs/mile average while increasing my weekly mileage back up to the 35 mile range, then 45 in XMAS week including my all time PR for the 8.2 mile pump station 65 run of 7:47/mile (1:03). That's a PR over 12 years.
