Tempo run. 3 miles warm up, 4 miles @ 15K to 1/2M pace, 2 miles cool down. 5:39 am, 26°F, 36% humidity, wind 2 SSE, slightly waning gibbous moon. My husband has a comp day today, and so he was able to help out with the kids this morning, which gave me a little more time. It's a good thing because I hit my snooze alarm twice this morning before I was even conscious that I was hitting it, and so I was a little late getting out the door. Today was the first day of my marathon training plan. I'm doing the 55-70 MPW, 18 week schedule out of Advanced Marathoning by Pete Pfitzinger. But I also recently started reading Brain Training for Runners by Matt Fitzegerald. Even though I'm not using Fitzgerald's training plan (I haven't even looked at his training plans yet), I'm using some things from this book. Specifically, he gives some core conditioning exercises, which are to be done twice a week, some dynamic flexibility exercises, which are to be done as a warm-up, particularly before high-intensity runs, and some proprioceptive cues to focus on during your runs. He recommends that you focus on one cue at a time and focus on it for the entire length of every run you do for a week. So this morning I did Fitzgerald's dyanimic stretches before my run and then during the run I tried to focus on a proprioceptive cue that he calls "Pounding the Ground." In this cue, you are supposed to "practice actively driving your foot into the ground." I don't think I manage to focus consciously on that cue for the entire run, but I did for the better part of the run. I'll do the core condition exercises either on Tuesdays and Thursdays or on Wednesdays and Fridays. I'm leaning towards Tuesdays and Thursdays post run. As for today's run, according to the McMillan calculator, my 15K pace is 7:53 and my 1/2M pace is 8:04 (not that I've ever run a half marathon that fast). I struggled to hit that pace during the first 2 miles of the tempo portion because those were almost entirely uphill. I had a much easier time hitting that pace during the second 2 miles of the tempo portion because then I had a gradual downhill. AP for the whole run was 8:48. Average pace for the tempo portion was 8:06, so I didn't quite make it into the range. Splits were: 9:37, 9:35, 9:25, 8:20, 8:20, 7:57, 7:49, 9:04, 9:02, and 0.15 @ 9:29.
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