I was going to put off my first workout of the week until tomorrow and just do 8-10 miles of whatever today on a treadmill, but after 1 mile of what would've been the equivalent of warm-up pace for a tempo (a bit under 7:00), I realized that I felt great and decided to do the 10 mile tempo today. Reset the treadmill and locked in at 5:52 pace. Over the next 10, I did a bit at 5:49, but mostly at 5:52, until somehow I had enough left to drop the last mile in 5:36 for a total of 58:29 (5:51 average). Out of curiosity, I wore my HR monitor and found that, for whatever reason, it took a little while to increase up to my tempo HR range (literally almost 2 miles, despite sub-6 miling) even though I would've thought the effort was about the same the entire time. Despite this long build-up (didn't break 170 until a mile and a quarter), I averaged 1 BPM higher heart rate than I did in the 10k on Saturday (176 to 175), so I was actually working harder than I did in the 10k race for most of the workout (was sitting as high as 181 after mile 8 with tempo pace and got up to 186 in the last mile). Besides the fact that I'm a classic workout warrior, I think that this is because I have a hard time pushing myself all out in short stuff on the road, whereas I simply force a fast pace that I know I'm capable of in treadmill workouts, which requires me to either hold the pace or fly off the back. :) In any case, it's obviously a bit easier to run on the treadmill than in a snowstorm, but I split 10k in 36:23 today (compared to 37:08 at the race), feeling like I was working hard, but confident about my ability to hold it, and continued on with another 3.8 at a slightly faster average pace. This was a major mental boost to me. Even if treadmill pace isn't totally accurate, I definitively proved to myself that I'm in better shape than I showed on Saturday based on my ability to hold a higher cardiac effort for 50+% longer than I did in the race. By the way, does anyone see why I went without a Garmin for awhile? All I do is think about numbers when I have one. Hah. | 