A.M. Started the run with a warmup and a 5 mile tempo on the Fast Running Blog course. It was a new experience because I wore my form correction buzzer on the armband for the first time in a tempo. The first mile was good - 5:40, then I held the pace to 1.5 and all of a sudden started fading - the legs felt dead. The buzzer was going off once every few steps, so the form was not perfect, but it never is. I normally would focus on just pushing when I feel like this, but this time I decided to focus on keeping the buzzer quiet. It was an odd experience as I was not running any slower than I normally would when feeling like this, except it was rather easy. I just could not figure out how to speed up. So my second mile was 5:44, then 5:53, and 5:52. In the last 0.5 I finally figured out how to speed up without tripping the buzzer, and ran the last two quarters in 86 and 81, which gave me 5:43 for the last mile and 28:51 for the tempo. It was an odd experience because I finished quite fresh in spite of losing the pace and being unable to go faster. I originally planned to cut the long run short if there were problems in the tempo, but I felt that I should go full 20, and run a short tempo at the end of it to see what would happening. So I came home, did the kids runs - 3 with Benjamin, 1 with Joseph, 0.5 with Jacob and 2 with Jenny and Julia, and then ran a 4 mile tempo to finish the 20. The course was not the best, especially the first 2 miles because they are a slight uphill with turns and tunnels. When you run those downhill, the downhill still does not quite make up for the mess, so when you run them uphill you get a double hit. So I did 6:02, 6:08, then turned around and stepped on the gas a little because I now did not have any fear of crashing on fuel. The last two miles were 5:52 and 5:50, and felt quite easy, but I could not go faster without tripping the buzzer. I guess the buzzer shows that I am like an old car. When it goes 55 you cannot tell it is old. But when you get it up to 75, it starts rattling. I suppose today the magic pace was 5:50 - I could coast just fine at 5:50 forever, but trying to go faster resulted in bad form, so it was not sustainable.
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