Before I had a Garmin to measure my routes, my 10 mile circuit was shorter than it is now by about 1 minute. In other words, the Garmin said it was less than 10 miles so I extended it. I don't have a Garmin now but still stick to the new, longer route.
On the old route I once ran round in 58 minutes something, and a couple of times in a 59. There's no chance I'll repeat those times these days because I'm slower and it's further but I do like to compare my current self to my old self by knocking off that minute in my head to see just how much slower (or not) I am these days.
Yesterday (Monday) I couldn't really be bothered to train as it was quite a warm day and work had been very tiring in the afternoon. So I threw sticks in river instead of walking Scamp a long way then also waited a while longer to allow the temp to drop a bit more.
Wanting to have an easy end to this week to prepare for the tough 13 mile race coming up on Sunday, but also wanting to train hard up to midweek I decided to run the 10 mile circuit in reps of 11 minutes hard with 4 minutes jog recovery. My (Scottys) famous session.
The fourth interval was a real test of endurance as by then I was pretty wasted and no longer running inside six minute miling. But the previous three were good enough to give my best result for a long time 10 miles in 61:18.
When I think back to only ever beating the hour on three different occasions on the old course, yesterday time, adjusted to 60:18 is pretty damn close to what I used to accomplish. I am determined to do this exact route/session again soon, hopefully in light drizzly rain. I know I can run it faster than 61 minutes on my own. Perhaps if I had someone like Scotty to train with again I would run even faster (he used to run it in less than 55 minutes!!!)
Penrith Stu said I shouldn't have blogged about my foolish error up the fells on Sunday, but by writing about the bad stuff I feel vindication for droning on when things are going well.
Interesting I often find I can run a route faster by splitting it up in to sections of hard-easy!
ReplyDeleteI guess in a way it's like running one mile at a time of a marathon.
We are kind of fooling our 'central governors' into allowing us to push the limits higher.
I have what I thought was a 6 mile sandhill loop which we thought was 6 miles, it turned out to be 4.7 miles!!!
anyway you seem to be going really strong if a little tired, bit of a taper and your be flying for the Race :0]