Thursday, July 17, 2014

Day 2,755: A gift from the weather

Amid this summer's crazy heat came a gift today of very cool weather. Most days I can expect temperatures at the crack of dawn to be about 71 degrees. Today it was 10 degrees cooler.

After running for the last five days in my Skechers Go Run 2 shoes (they are great for travel because they are so light) I went back to my Nike Air Pegasus 31s for my 6-mile tempo run. From the start they felt very comfortable.

Most mornings I don't have a lot of wiggle room (or patience) so I've kept my warm-up and cool down runs to the minimum distance of 1 mile. I think it shows in my data, since I've noticed that even in my 6-mile regular routes, I don't feel totally warmed up or pick up speed until after about 3 miles.

But these training sessions are good practice because when marathon day comes, there's no way I'm going to be running 3 miles before I run another 26.2.

Today I struggled to keep pace after the first mile of the tempo run. An 8:45/mile pace in a race for me is almost effortless -- it is running without struggling. In miles 2 and 3 I really struggled to find this pace and after that, it was extremely easy to run at my marathon race pace. I left this workout really unsure what the difference is between an 8:45/mile pace and one above 9:00/mile.

I think there were some benefits -- at the end of the eight total miles I felt pretty refreshed and ready to tackle more. I didn't because there will be plenty of extra mileage soon enough.

Time: 6:31 a.m.
Temp: 61 degrees
Gear: Technical T-shirt, short (Beltline Southwest 5K), shorts, Nike Air Pegasus+ 31.

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