The Need For Speed

If there's one thing I've skimped on this training cycle, it's on my speed workouts. (OK, so I haven't done that well with my long runs either...) The Marathon pace runs have come along nicely, but the speed and strength workouts have been a struggle. Why? Well for the 1st half of the summer, the running club inhibited me from getting into a comfort zone, due to the lack of recovery after a double on Monday and Thursday. Still, I thought that since my speed is a strength of mine, I wouldn't worry about it. 2nd, the unbearable humidity and heat this summer have sapped my energy quite a bit more than I'd care to admit. So running hard on a morning when it's 70+ degrees and darn near the same dew point gets a bit ridiculous. So the past couple of days have seen a nice stretch for me in terms of consistency and hard work. On Wednesday I did a nice strong marathon pace workout of 7.2 miles @ 6:39 pace. This was b/c Tuesday was morning thunderstorms. Then after 8 easy miles each on Thurs and Fri, I managed an excellent 10 mile run on Saturday, w/ 8 miles @ 6:15 pace. That's what I'll call my lactate threshold pace, since I know I could probably keep that pace up for another ten minutes (I ran for 50 minutes @ that pace). Then after more rain (!) I ran 13 miles in the rain on Sunday, and anothe ho hum 8 miler on Monday. This morning called for 3x2 miles @ 6:20 pace, and I haven't done one of these workouts since May, so I was a bit apprehensive. The first one was a bit slow (12:58), and my 1st mile of the 2nd repeat (I do this on a measured road course in my neighborhood) was still 6:30 pace. The next three miles (minus the 1/2 mile jog recovery) made up for that... 6:09, 6:14 and 6:07. I still felt smooth, and was able to easily run a two mile recovery cool down afterwards @ 8:00 pace.

So what does this mean? I guess it means that I can go after the upcoming half marathon on 9/15 @ about a 6:20 pace and see for how long I can hold on. That pace would give me a 1:23 finish time, or a 5:30 PR. I'm not too worried about recovery, since it's 22 days before the marathon. So we'll just keep going, for 46 more days (but who's counting?)