If you asked a stadium-size crowd of runners to name the most important type of running workout, some would say tempo runs, others would say long runs, and still others would say intervals of one kind or another. None would mention recovery runs. Unless I happened to be in that stadium.
Long Run
Being Sunday it was the normal early morning alarm call and the obligatory long run with the boys. This morning it was a 2 hour easy run, not worrying too much about pace but more time on legs, the bread and butter long run. We set of from Hillary’s car park and move gingerly towards City Beach which was 13k to the South and would make a good turning point. As it was we reached City beach dead on 13k and 1 hour , perfect pacing.
Of course on the way back we up’d the pace as we got closer to the finish and the lure of coffee enticed us quicker kilometre by kilometre. A good negative split of 3 minutes and a quick last 5k was always on the cards and yet again we all probably failed in our main goal of a time on feet, easy long run.
So yet again our long run turned into a progressive, my third for the week, and I realised that running in a group you are always going to end up with a progressive finish, it must be a ‘man thing’ , too competitive. Maybe we need to try and get more females into the Sunday long run group to try and calm the testosterone that eventually always comes to a crescendo when you can smell the coffee, around the last 5k mark. On the bright side because Mark Lee decided to have a lie in we weren’t running sub 4min/k average for the last 5k and the finish was testing but not ‘pain box’ suffering. Looking back through my last few months of long, easy runs and I seem to have this ‘fast finish’ spurt on all of them, if it’s not Mark it’ll be Ross or the T-train pushing the pace and I’ll hang on because what other option is there ? All thoughts of a long easy run are forgotten and it becomes a ‘last man standing’ sprint to the finish. Maybe I’ll get Matt Fitzgerald alone on one of these long easy runs and see how he goes with 5k to go and the smell of caffeine in his nostrils !! I’m sure he’ll be sprinting to the finish with the rest of us.
An article below from Matt Fitzgerald explains the theory behind junk miles and recovery runs, good news if you like to run slow, which unfortunately me and the boys don’t do on a Sunday. Maybe I’ll print this and hand it out before the next ling run and we’ll discuss it’s merits. It won’t help of course because with 5k to go you know it’s on for young and old……
I won’t go quite so far as to say that recovery runs are more important than tempo runs, long runs, and intervals, but I do believe they are no less important. Why? Because recovery runs, if properly integrated into your training regimen, will do just as much to enhance your race performances as any other type of workout. Seriously.
It is widely assumed that the purpose of recovery runs—which we may define as relatively short, slow runs undertaken within a day after a harder run—is to facilitate recovery from preceding hard training. You hear coaches talk about how recovery runs increase blood flow to the legs, clearing away lactic acid, and so forth. The truth is that lactic acid levels return to normal within an hour after even the most brutal workouts. Nor does lactic acid cause muscle fatigue in the first place. Nor is there any evidence that the sort of light activity that a recovery run entails promotes muscle tissue repair, glycogen replenishment, or any other physiological response that actually is relevant to muscle recovery.
In short, recovery runs do not enhance recovery. The real benefit of recovery runs is that they allow you to find the optimal balance between the two factors that have the greatest effect on your fitness and performance: training stress and running volume. Here’s how.Training stress is what your body experiences in workouts that test the present limits of your running fitness. You can be fairly sure a workout has delivered a training stress when it leaves you severely fatigued or completely exhausted. The two basic categories of workouts that deliver a training stress are high-intensity runs (intervals, tempo runs, hill repeats) and long runs. A training program designed to prepare you for a peak race performance must feature plenty of “key workouts” that challenge your body’s capacity to resist the various causes of high-intensity fatigue (muscular acidosis, etc.) and long-duration fatigue (muscle tissue damage, etc). By exposing your body to fatigue and exhaustion, key workouts stimulate adaptations that enable you to resist fatigue better the next time.
Running volume, on the other hand, has a positive effect on running fitness and performance even in the absence of exhaustive key workouts. In other words, the more running you do (within the limit of what your body can handle before breaking down), the fitter you become, even if you never do any workouts that are especially taxing. The reason is that increases in running economy are very closely correlated with increases in running mileage. Research by Tim Noakes, M.D., and others suggests that while improvement in other performance-related factors such as VO2 max ceases before a runner achieves his or her volume limit, running economy continues to improve as running mileage increases, all the way to the limit. For example, if the highest running volume your body can handle is 50 miles per week, you are all but certain to achieve greater running economy at 50 miles per week than at 40 miles per week, even though your VO2 max may stop increasing at 40 miles.
You see, running is a bit like juggling. It is a motor skill that requires communication between your brain and your muscles. A great juggler has developed highly refined communication between his brain and muscles during the act of juggling, which enables him to juggle three plates with one hand while blindfolded. A well-trained runner has developed super-efficient communication between her brain and muscles during the act of running, allowing her to run at a high, sustained speed with a remarkably low rate of energy expenditure. Sure, the improvements that a runner makes in neuromuscular coordination are less visible than those made by a juggler, but they are no less real.
For both the juggler and the runner, it is time spent simply practicing the relevant action that improves communication between the brain and the muscles. It’s not a matter of testing physiological limits, but of developing a skill through repetition. Thus, the juggler who juggles an hour a day will improve faster than the juggler who juggles five minutes a day, even if the former practices in a dozen separate five-minute sessions and therefore never gets tired. And the same is true for the runner.Now, training stress—especially key workouts inflicting high-intensity fatigue—and running volume sort of work at cross-purposes. If you go for a bona fide training stress in every workout, you won’t be able to do a huge total amount of running before breaking down. By the same token, if you want to achieve the maximum volume of running, you have to keep the pace slow and avoid single long runs in favor of multiple short runs. But then you won’t get those big fitness boosts that only exhaustive runs can deliver. In other words, you can’t maximize training stress and running volume simultaneously. For the best results, you need to find the optimal balance between these two factors, and that’s where recovery runs come in.
By sprinkling your training regimen with relatively short, easy runs, you can achieve a higher total running volume than you could if you always ran hard. Yet because recovery runs are gentle enough not to create a need for additional recovery, they allow you to perform at a high level in your key workouts and therefore get the most out of them.
I believe that recovery runs also yield improvements in running economy by challenging the neuromuscular system to perform in a pre-fatigued state. Key workouts themselves deliver a training stress that stimulates positive fitness adaptations by forcing a runner to perform beyond the point of initial fatigue. As the motor units that are used preferentially when you run begin to fatigue, other motor units that are less often called upon must be recruited to take up the slack so the athlete can keep running. In general, “slow-twitch” muscle fibers are recruited first and then “fast-twitch” fibers become increasingly active as the slow-twitch fibers wear out. By encountering this challenge, your neuromuscular system is able to find new efficiencies that enable you to run more economically.
Recovery runs achieve a similar effect in a slightly different way. In a key workout, you experience fatigued running by starting fresh and running hard or far. In a recovery run you start fatigued from your last key workout and therefore experience a healthy dose of fatigued running without having to run hard or far. For this reason, although recovery runs are often referred to as “easy runs,” if they’re planned and executed properly they usually don’t feel very easy. Speaking from personal experience, while my recovery runs are the shortest and slowest runs I do, I still feel rather miserable in many of them because I am already fatigued when I start them. This miserable feeling is, I think, indicative of the fact that the run is accomplishing some real, productive work that will enhance my fitness perhaps almost as much as the key workout that preceded it. Viewed in this way, recovery runs become essentially a way of squeezing more out of your key workouts.
Recovery runs are perhaps the most neglected type of running workout, probably because most runners don’t see them as making a positive contribution to running fitness and performance. There is a tendency to assume that a run doesn’t really “count” unless it’s at least somewhat challenging, and to train accordingly. Consequently, all too many competitive runners never really do any proper recovery runs—runs that are short and/or slow enough to create no need for recovery. As a result, these runners are seldom as fresh as they ought to be for their key workouts, they don’t perform optimally in them, and they don’t get as much out of them. At the same time, because they go at least moderately hard in every run, these runners are not able to handle as much total running volume as they could if they did true recovery runs.
If this sounds like you, I hope I’ve convinced you that recovery runs can help you race faster, just as tempo runs, intervals, and long runs can, and I hope that this new understanding will motivate you to plan and execute recovery runs with as much care as you do these other workouts.
Now that I’ve sold you on the benefits of recovery runs, let’s look at how to do them so that they most effectively serve their purpose of balancing training stress and running volume in your training.
- If you run fewer than five times a week, recovery runs are generally unnecessary. Recovery runs can only serve their purpose of balancing training stress with running volume if you run five or more times per week. If you run just three or four times per week, you’re better off going for a training stress in each run, or at least in three out of four.
- Whenever you run again within 24 hours of completing a “key” workout (i.e., a workout that has left you severely fatigued or exhausted), the follow-up run should usually be a recovery run.
- Do key workouts and recovery runs in a 1:1 ratio. There’s seldom a need to insert two easy runs between hard runs, and it’s seldom advisable to do two consecutive hard runs within 24 hours. A good schedule for runners who run six days a week is three key workouts alternating with three recovery runs, as in the following example:
Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Off Key Workout(high intensity) Recovery Run Key Workout(high intensity) Recovery Run Key Workout(long duration) Recovery Run
- Most elite runners who train twice a day do a hard run in the morning followed by a recovery run in the afternoon, or a hard run in the afternoon followed by a recovery run the next morning. The frequency is twice that of the above example, but the ratio of key workouts to recovery runs remains 1:1.
- Recovery runs are largely unnecessary during base training, when most of your workouts are moderate in both intensity and duration. When you begin doing formal high-intensity workouts and exhaustive long runs, it’s time to begin doing recovery runs in a 1:1 ratio with these key workouts.
- There are no absolute rules governing the appropriate duration and pace of recovery runs. A recovery run can be as long and fast as you want, provided it does not affect your performance in your next scheduled key workout (which is not particularly long or fast, in most cases). Indeed, because the purpose of recovery runs is to maximize running volume without sacrificing training stress, your recovery runs should generally be as long as you can make them, short of affecting your next key workout. A little experimentation is needed to find the recovery run formula that works best for each individual runner.
- Don’t be too proud to run very slowly in your recovery runs, as Kenya’s runners are famous for doing. Even very slow running counts as practice of the running stride that will yield improvements in your running economy, and running very slowly allows you to run longer (i.e. maximize volume) without sabotaging your next key workout.
Sunday morning is the long run with the lads, although over the years this may have morphed from a Saturday to a Sunday , the weekend long run is the bread and butter run of marathon and long distance runners. We all know that , in the foundation stage at least, this run should be about time on feet. The long run is a reward for all the hard runs you may have completed in the week, it’s a time to smell the roses and eat the pancakes, while enjoying great coffee. Hell, it should actually be time to enjoy running for the pure pleasure of just running. No need to look at the watch (but you must wear a GPS enabled Strava friendly watch of course, otherwise the run never happened!) and time to look up from the pavement and actually enjoy the view of your running surroundings. (Living in Perth and running normally on bike paths close to the ocean this may be a tad easier for me but still you can find beauty anywhere, you may just need to look a bit harder sometimes.)
Over the last 6 months I have been adding distance and doubling up daily and this has been a success, as you can see from my Strava extract. Since Christmas, there has been no slacking off and I feel my body is getting use to the extra workload and I still look forward to every run but….
Recently my friend Mark ‘one speed’ Lee has been joining me for some of my early morning 10k ‘old faithful’ runs and this has made the pace a tad more competitive. This Monday for instance we ended up finishing sprinting up the last hill sub 4min/k pace, on an easy recovery run after the Sunday long run in Bold Park. Not a good idea for us distance fans. This was compounded by a couple of runs early in the week with Justin ‘one pace and it’s quick’ Kelly, after I specifically told him recovery. To add to my pain the runs with Justin were in the middle of the day, so add in heat !
This mornings 24k was again meant to be a time on legs, still recovering from the ADU 100k a few weeks earlier, type of run. Not a chance, with Mark leading from the front we went out pretty hard and came back even quicker. Mark did leave us at one point allowing me to slow the pace a tad but unfortunately (for me) he got lost and rejoined us for the last 5k.
I think you can see the Mark effect from about 20k onwards. Of course you can let Mark go on his merry way but he has the knack of drawing you in and before you know it you’re in a mad dash to the finish. Call it a competitive nature or just plain silly, I suspect at my age it is the latter. (I’m fifty now you know.)
The moral of this story is this week I have been feeling the extra pace thanks to my training partners from hell Mark and Justin. Both are younger, faster and ,at the moment, running less weekly kilometres; add these three things together and you have one very tired 50 year old runner. There is a silver lining to this week of pain of course. If you can survive the experience I believe you come out the other end a better runner but there is the caveat that too many of these weeks will eventually lead to exhaustion and fatigue , which in turns leads to injury. Running the weekly distances I’m currently running I need to be mindful of the 80%-20% split with 80% being easy runs , not the mark Lee version of 20%-80%. (Matt Fitzgerald would not approve!)
The long run is probably the one run just about every runner gets wrong, it’s not in our nature to slow down to a point that you feel there is no benefit. A favourite run of mine is the last 5-10k at marathon pace which may be down to the fact that I feel I haven’t done enough so flog myself so when I’m wolfing down the post-run pancakes I don’t feel guilty. Is this the right approach, according to most coaches probably not but we are fickle things us runners and although we set of with good intentions the next thing you know you’re chasing Mark Lee at the end of your long easy run at sub 3:50min/k pace ! Trust me it happens, I’m sure every running group has a Mark Lee type runner who will push the pace and like rats following the Pied Piper we will follow. On the bright side the pancakes do taste better when you feel you’ve put in a big effort but that’s not the point of the run.
So what to take from this post.? Google ‘Long Slow Run’ and read the results, they will backup the ‘it’s a time on legs run‘ predominately, then next weekend when you are just about done and someone starts to up the pace think about this post and let them go. Long term it’s the thing to do. I reckon the post run pancakes will taste just as good, probably ?
Tomorrow is my Sunday morning long runs with the BK Posse. Have a 30k time on legs booked in with some hills as we train for the 6 inch ultra in a few weeks. ( http://www.6inchtrailmarathon.com ) I posted on this topic before but I thought it would be a good time to yet again talk about the long run being slow and steady. As you will know by now I’m a big advocate of the 80/20 rule. (80% slow and steady and 20% fast; it’s normally around 90-10 at the moment as I’m building endurance.) Also this article pushes the importance of distance which I am a really big believer in. Golden rule number one is distance first, then move onto pace. The longer you can run, without risking injury, the better, I do not believe there is such a thing as junk miles, if you are running you are improving, end of story.
To this end the obligatory weekend long run is so important because it is all about time of feet and building stamina rather than putting strain on the body by selecting the wrong gear and going out too fast or maintaining a pace not conducive to what a long run is really about. Of course the long run will mean different things at different times in your training. In the building phase it really is time on feet only where as when you enter the final phase of your marathon training you can add some marathon pace kilometres within the run, or even the old finish at marathon pace for the last 5k, one of my favourite endings.
Sarah Russel from Runners Connect wrote this great article explaining the long run and more importantly how so many runners just get it wrong,
Are You Sabotaging Your Long Run by Running the Wrong Pace?
The underlying principle of any training program, regardless of your goal or ability, should be the development of a solid aerobic base.
It’s the fundamental structure followed by almost every elite runner, in particular that of Kenyan athletes who spend around 85% of their time running at an ‘easy’ or ‘recovery’ pace.
Mo Farah reportedly runs around 120 miles per week, of which 80% at an easy pace. No doubt he and Galen Rupp are having a good old chat as they run up and down the hills in Boulder. Not the picture of hard elite training that you might imagine? Well, we can all learn from their approach.
Yet this is what most recreational runners get wrong. Running ‘easy’ doesn’t feel right (or hard enough), so they intuitively run at a ‘moderate’ pace, kidding themselves they’re running easy. Struggling to hold a conversation, a heavy sweat, and red face post run is a giveaway that you did not run ‘easy’!Running at an easy pace – and by that I mean well into the aerobic zone around 70% of your maximum heart rate – is actually quite hard to do.
You have to slow down A LOT and it feels like you’re going nowhere. But it’s important to stick with it.
In time (usually just a few weeks), your body will adapt, your pace will quicken (for the same effort level) and you’ll have developed a super efficient fat burning engine. So, stick with me here…this is the bedrock of your future training.
The long run can be a daunting part of training for a longer race, but if you follow the elite approach to easy running, you will be race ready in no time.Why running easy works
When I work with my beginner runners, we just focus on gradually increasing the length of time they can run for, and build up consistency of training – it’s simple and it works.
This is not the time to think about speed and pace, it is best to just get used to comfortable running where your body can adapt, stay healthy, and develop an efficient running rhythm.
Too many training plans out there have you doing speed intervals, tempo runs, and hills when you are just not ready. Of course it’s important to include a little of this ‘high end’ work, but a solid aerobic base is the fundamental foundation on which you’ll build everything else.
Regular aerobic training will train your body to utilize oxygen, preserve glycogen stores by using fat for fuel, and generally become more efficient.
However, I estimate that at least 75% of runners – of all abilities – run too fast too often, and end up in the ‘mid zone’; training neither the aerobic or anaerobic systems correctly.
Many coaches, myself included, recommend an overall balance of hard/easy training (whilst avoiding the moderate zone), a method now becoming known as ‘polarized training’. The avoidance of ‘moderate’ training is the key, and runners focus on ‘easy’ paced running for the majority of time, with a sprinkling of really hard work (where you really can’t chat!) mixed in for approx 20% of the weekly mileage.
Not only do you train a more efficient fat burning body, but the benefits mean you recover faster, and can therefore put in some harder efforts, rather than being chronically fatigued from ‘mid zone’ running’Recent research from Dr Stephen Seiler et al from the University of Agdar, Norway, backs up this methodology; finding that high volume, low intensity training stimulates greater training effects for recreational runners, in particular when using the 80/20 split of easy/hard training.
A conclusion backed up by the 2014 Salzburg study published in the Frontiers of Physiology, found that the concept of ‘polarized’ training demonstrated the greatest improvements.
After a 9 week training period, runners using the 80/20 easy/hard split had improved their ‘time to exhaustion’ by a whopping 17.4% and change in peak speed by 5.1%.This group had completed 68% of their training in the low intensity zone, and 24% at high intensity, with only 6% in the ‘moderate’ zone.
So what does that mean for you? How do you put this into practice?
In a world of high intensity training fads, advice to slow down might seem counterintuitive, but it works The key to running further, and ultimately faster is to slow down, especially for your long runs. Easy to say, but harder to do. If you take only one thing away from this article, it’s this – faster is NOT always better.
When you first start out running, you’re likely to have one pace. As you get more experienced and your fitness improves, you will need to develop a wider range of paces. Your long run or easy pace may be 90 seconds – three minutes slower than your ‘top end’ pace.
US Marathon Champion Esther Erb likes to make sure she takes her easy running seriously, “I see hard recovery runs as an indicator of insecurity. When it comes to recovery, it takes more confidence to run slowly than it does to run fast”. Erb runs the majority of her easy runs between 8:00 and 9:00 per mile! Although that pace may seem fast, keep in mind that her race pace is around 5:45 per mile!
This is the key to building up your long run. Simply slow down – to a walk if you need to – spend more time on your feet and just extend the time/distance bit by bit.How slow?
Using heart rate as a guide
But how slow is slow? If you want to be scientific about it, you can work out your heart rate training zones and try to keep your pulse at around 70% of your max. If you want to go down this route then use the following calculations:
1. Calculate your Maximum Heart Rate (MHR):
Women: 209 – (0.9 x age) = MHR
Men: 214 – (0.8 x age) = MHR
2. Calculate your Working Heart Rate (WHR) by subtracting your resting pulse (RHR)- measure as soon as you wake up in the morning (while still in bed) from your MRH.
MHR – RHR = WHR
3. Calculate 70% of WHR (0.7 x WHR) and add to your RHR. That should give you your 70% zone HR. This is where the bulk of your running, including your long run, should be. For the vast majority of people it will be around 130-140bpm.
You can also use our training zones calculator to assist you with this.
To work out your ‘top end’ zone, do the same but calculate 85%.
Using pace as your guide
If you don’t like heart rate (we don’t 🙂, then you can use pace as your guide.
Your optimal long run pace is between 55 and 75 percent of your 5k pace, with the average pace being about 65 percent.
From research, we also know that running faster than 75% of your 5k pace on your long run doesn’t provide a lot of additional physiological benefit. Therefore, pushing the pace beyond 75% of 5k pace only serves to make you more tired and hamper recovery.
In fact, the research indicates that it would be just as advantageous to run slower as it would be to run faster. 50-55 percent of 5k pace is pretty easy, but the research clearly demonstrates that it still provides near optimal physiological benefits.Additional Notes about Easy Long Runs
If you do not use a heart rate monitor, run at a comfortable pace where you can chat easily, without gasping for breath. If you can hear yourself breathing, you’re going too fast. On a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being super hard) you’ll be around a 5. It should feel really comfortable and the sort of pace you keep going at that pace for hours.
Forget about measuring your ‘pace’ and distance on your GPS watch at this stage. Focusing too much on your watch will only lead to you push on too fast, and undo all your good work.
Learn to run to ‘feel’ rather than keeping to a pace. Don’t forget, that ‘feel’ should be easy. Walk up hills, keep it steady and don’t put any pressure on yourself other than to go a little further.
Run with a friend (find one slower than you normally), have a nice chat, and check out the views. It might take a bit of time to get your head around it, but this is exactly the methodology that will take you to the next level.Those long easy runs – through the countryside or on the trails, with your partner or running buddy – are to be treasured. Use the time to catch up with your spouse or kids, explore new routes and revel in the joy of going long. There’s nothing else like it.
As I run my long run Sunday Saturday night is all about getting ready for the early morning start (we meet up at 6am come hell or waters high!) and the time on legs and everything that encompasses. Normally the long run is at recovery pace but as you near the end of a marathon training block it’s time for that long run at MP pace (marathon pace) . This is normally, or at least should be, a challenge. This article from Ed Eyestone from Runners World sums it up really…
Whether you hope to win your age group in a local 5-K or run a sub-2:19 marathon to qualify for the 2012 Men’s Olympic Trials, the long run can help you accomplish that goal. How can I be so brash to suggest the long run has such wide-reaching benefits for achievements so diverse? Easy. I see it work every year. I’m convinced the improvement most of my freshmen runners experience in their first year is largely due to the cardiovascular development they acquire from running long.
Long runs deliver a slew of physiological benefits: The heart gets stronger because it works harder to boost blood flow to leg, arm, and core muscles. Our ventilatory capacity—the ability to move oxygen in and out of our lungs—increases as we develop our respiratory muscles. Muscle strength and endurance improves because mitochondria (the energy-producing structures in cells) and capillaries (tiny blood vessels that transfer oxygen and waste products into and out of cells) become more dense. Long runs also teach the body to use fat rather than glycogen, or stored sugar, as a fuel source. This saves our limited glycogen reserves for fast running at the end of a long run or marathon. Finally, going long calluses you mentally and gives you confidence in your ability to cover many miles.
In order to reap the rewards of the long run—and avoid injury—keep the following three principles in mind.
NOT TOO FAST
Think conversational. For slower runners who race at close to their training speed, that’s 30 seconds to one minute per mile slower than 10-K race pace. For experienced racehorses, it’s about one to 1:30 per mile slower.NOT TOO LONG
If you’re gunning for a faster 5-K, your long run will likely last an hour; marathoners should build up to three hours. Run longer than that, and the physiological gains are outweighed by the stress put on your body. I believe that anything over three hours should be saved for race day—if you’ve consistently run at the proper pace for two to three hours, and tapered adequately, you’ll safely complete 26.2 on race day. Over six consecutive weeks, stair-step your long run as follows: two hours, two and a half hours, three hours, two hours, two and a half hours, and three hours. Taper the run down for three weeks before marathon day.NOT TOO FAR
The appropriate distance of your long run is one and a half to twice as long as your normal-length run. Another way to determine distance is to make your longest run 20 to 30 percent of your overall weekly mileage. So if you’re running 40 miles a week, you could run eight to 12 miles for your long run.
GO FAR: Long runs should last between one and three hours.
Sunday morning is long runs with the gang. Anything from a few runners to unto 10 depending on who’s training for what. Always a 6am start, which means some running in the dark in Winter, but overall the best part of the day. This morning my mate Dean who is training for Chicago in 3 weeks wanted a 30k at a good effort. After my 5k park run yesterday I wasn’t that keen but kept him honest for the distance. Finished in just over 2 hours at 4:05min/k average. Probably pushed harder that I would have liked but the 2hrs on my feet was more important. Leaves me marooned on 155k for the week, 6k short of the magical 100 mile week. I’ll try and find time tonight to put that right. Took some shots of the pancakes and the lads relaxing at the end of a great run. As always Perth put on perfect conditions.
This long run was probably too fast but normally it’s all about time on feet. Getting your body use to the extra time needed to run and race a marathon. It can be an enjoyable experience if you’re after time and distance rather than pace. Today, thanks to Dean, it was all three. Nice when you finish but the last 10k is challenging. Overall though you know it’s doing you some good and it’s all about paying your dues now rather than on the big day.
Great morning for a run. Usual suspects all running a Park Run and because I have to drop the Wife and No1 Daughter at the airport tomorrow I had to go long by myself. Longs runs by yourself are a good time to reflect on ‘stuff’., anything really. Makes the K’s disappear if you can drift away and ponder. Today was an easy run until I heard footsteps behind me and then ‘it was on’ for 5k. Can’t be seen to be over taken. The vanity of a runner. After that runner was dispatched it was back to 4.15min/k pace until the end of the run which coincided with the local park run and a nice warm down with some friends. All in all a good mornings work and moving along to 130k for the week so far, and run number 11 for the week.