Thursday 3 December 2009

Rainy day tempo run experiment.


I dodged the club session last night as just too knackered from work and getting up at 5am etc. Thought I would try to do some kind of tempo session today and simultaneously get out in the daylight as I've worked all the daylight hours since Sunday. (Not hard to do.)

As it turned out there wasn't much light today as the clouds were low and it was raining. The temperature was just above freezing and there was a cold West wind blowing. I struggled to think of a session so I turned to one of our favourite running books "Running Tough" by Michael Sandrock. Looking at a few sessions I thought I would invent a session based on heart rate. As most books seem to identify lactate threshold pace as being around 85% of MHR I thought I would run to the meadows and run 6 miles - starting at 85% of Max and then increasing in intensity by 1% for each mile. It would be a 12 mile run with 6 miles tempo in the middle.

It was quite a diverting session but my pace isn't very quick at 85%. My first mile was 8.03 and then the rest did get quicker. I worry that this is too slow but I was tired by the 6th lap which I did in 7.40. Is this really the right intensity to be running? Dunno. Anyway, why am I giving myself a hard time? I ended up running 13 and a bit miles as I ran round the back of Arthur's Seat on the way home to make up the mileage. Never even noticed the rain once I was going. Great soundtrack Peter recently downloaded from somewhere but I couldn't tell you what it was...Photo stolen randomly off the www.

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