Slowly Getting Faster

Today was supposed to be an easy 9, just to warm the legs back up.  It started really slowly, but after about 2 miles I was feeling pretty good.  I decided that I should do a bit of a tempo, just see how far I could push a sub 8:30 mile. After keeping my pace below 8:25 for 5 miles I decided I should cool down for the last 2.  Hopefully I feel as good tomorrow when I go for the hills. 

I changed shoes today in an effort to keep my feet fresh. I'm not sure it helped. I used to like these Kinavara's quite a bit but since my injury nothing is as comfortable as my instincts.  Right our the gate today my legs were sore.  It started with a slight soreness that progressed into more soreness as the run went on.  By mile 5 my legs had finally warmed up.  This is something I have experienced in the past with these shoes but I have never had this trouble with the Instincts. I think having a bit of a heel on these shoes makes the canyon decent a bit easier though as I don't have to focus so much on keeping my form perfect. 

Today's run was tedious.  It started slow because my legs were sore and tired.  It never got fast.  It took until mile 5 to finally work all the stiffness out but even at that point I didn't really have it in me to move very fast. As a result, I tried to make this a recovery run.  We'll see how well that worked out tomorrow. 

I noticed a few ankle issues on a couple of turns. I need to baby it a little still.  I hope this is gone by mid October.  

I didn't get out of bed this morning and I had a job interview before lunch so I had to "sneak" my run in between the job interview and going to my current job. As a result, my run was in Salt Lake, so I went up City Creek again. I haven't been up there in a long time. I managed to finish with an average pace of 9:14, which isn't great but is pretty good considering I was at an average pace of 10 when I turned around. Miles 7, 8, & 9 were sub 8 pace, which is obviously partially due to the fact that they were downhill.  Still, there were some even sections that I pushed the pace on trying to keep it below 8. Felt pretty good and I'm glad I got it in. 

I didn't want to do a long run today because I'm planning on going for 20 tomorrow. I did want to get something in though, so I can start teaching my body to run 6 days a week.  The problem with this plan is that if I'm only going a few miles I feel like I should run quickly.  As a result, I did these 4 miles in a average 7:41 pace with my slowest mile being 7:59 and my fastest being 7:23. I hope that doesn't kill my legs for tomorrow.  

Miserable run.