Wednesday, October 26, 2005

A Nice Autumn Run

Tonight I headed out to run my 14K/8.7M route, with no particular time goal in mind. It was an unseasonably warm day, 23C/74F, sunny and mild. My legs were kind of stiff from all the cross-training I’ve added to schedule lately, so I just headed out and ran until I fell into a comfortable pace. I noticed last year that my speed seems to naturally slow down this time of year and even more so when the winter sets in. So no big deal, there is no need to be pushing my body hard 12 months a year anyway.

So that said I still averaged a 5:45/K (9:14/M) pace for the run. This is actually about 15-30 seconds slower per kilometer than I was doing a lot of the runs previously. I want to do my first long run on Saturday morning, probably 24-26K (15-16M), but I’ll see when I get out there.

I want to slow my long run pace down some, I think I was pushing too hard when I was training for my last marathon. It was getting hard to distinguish the difference in pace between my tempo runs, easy runs and long runs – they were all almost the same pace! I’m thinking about maybe a 6:30/K (10:28/M) pace, at least during the winter months. This may mean a slightly slower marathon in the Spring – or maybe not!

Comments:
Sounds like a good run and a good plan.
 
Yeah, I'm curious how that will play out. Forcing yourself to slow down can't be bad, especially when you're building base miles. I would bet that adding some specific speed intervals, you'd be able to get away with not doing a lot of "tempo runs" until much closer to the actual race. Obviously, I'm no expert, but it just seems like a very sane (injury-free!) way to approach it when it's so many months in the future.

Like I said, it will be interesting to see!
 
Sounds good - build up the aerobic base over the winter months with some nice long runs at an easy pace (maybe even increase the weekly mileage)and then start throwing in some weekly intervals and repeats at the track (or the road) a couple of months before the marathon.

No need for a slower spring marathon!
 
yeah sounds like a good plan to me! i still am not sure at what pace to do my training frankly. i hope to do a decent sized run on sat also, supposed to be warmer here. have a good run.
 
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