Marathon Pace Run

I didn't get out first thing in the morning. For some reason I had it in my head that I'd be able to get up at 5am in the morning and head out to do my run. Because of the day light savings switch, it meant that my body would be getting up at 4am. Yeah right.

I waited till about 11am which was a good thing since it warmed up a bit and any black ice on the sidewalks had melted just enough to get some traction. Plan was to do 2 mile long run warm up, 12 miles @ 7:30 and then 1 mile cool down.

Lap	Lap Time		Lap	Lap Time
1	08:44.1		9	07:45.8
2	08:29.6		10	07:18.3
3	07:25.9		11	07:27.3
4	07:45.6		12	07:35.3
5	07:43.2		13	07:29.5
6	07:34.9		14	07:11.5
7	07:28.1		15	09:00.4
8	08:11.3

For the most part, I think I was able to maintain the proper pace. Most of the slow downs were due to having to tip toe on ice around big puddles of water. Lap 8 included a long stretch of walking. I also ended up having to stop for a lot of traffic lights. Normally I hate stopping for them, but on this run they were a welcome site as it would allow me to catch a breather. After mile 9, there were no more traffic lights and I was able to maintain a pretty good clip. I decided to try to do mile 14 at LT pace, where I was probably going faster than 7 min/mile but I ended up having to slow down towards the end of it because of a side stitch. Still pretty good for a 7:11 pace though.

HR seemed a bit high. The HR was pretty consistent with what happened the last time I had tried this run. Again I had the same belief that it was a bit on the high side. Ideally I'd like to keep the HR below 170. There were times where I was approaching 180 which I think is way too high.

Next week is a recovery week. I'm hoping that this snow and ice will melt enough by Wednesday so that I can do my VO2max workout on the track. I visited that community centre with the indoor track and didn't think it was that impressive. It's 2 lanes wide and is basically suspended above a hockey rink. It was way too cold and not much room to maneuver. Plus they weren't sure how long the track was and it wasn't marked so getting splits is going to be difficult.