5:00am. After 2 days off of running I was feeling exceptionally frisky today, had no plans for speed work this week on the schedule but after reading the race results for the Halloween 1/2 I couldn't help but ask myself the obvious question, could I run back to back 5:00/miles on a downhill grade?? Humm, I've never ran even 1 mile in under 5:20 so wasn't sure how it would turn out. Ran a 3 mile warm up then set the treadmill to -3% grade and 12mph, could tell right off that the main problem was my body wasn't used to running that fast, felt really unstable like I was going to crash, tried to concentrate on just keeping good form, kind of got into a grove and kept it up. 2 miles was fairly easy but started hurting after that, my legs started feeling tight, especially the calfs. Decided to make it an even 3 miles to held on until 3. Pretty happy I was able to go that far, definately couldn't have gone another 10.1 at sub 6:00 pace after that but still happy. Ran another 3 mile cool down for 9 miles total. The other thing I did was dust off the old heart rate monitor for todays run. I stopped wearing it around mid summer, but decided I wanted to start wearing it again to see where I was. I was very pleased with the results, I was able to run at 6:20 pace at around 155bpm, at the begining of the year 155 is where I was at 7:00 pace so definate improvement there, the other suprising thing was that I didn't break 170 until about 2.5 miles into the tempo run. 170 is about 85% of my max and just barely into Lactate threshold zone, or the top end of Marathon pace. I knew I was feeling really good lately at higher speeds but now I have validation that I am in fact feeling better :). Run went like this. 3 miles in 19:35 6:31 avg pace 3 miles in 15:00 5:00 avg pace -3% decline 3 miles in 19:40 6:33 avg pace Total 9 miles in 54:15 6:01 avg pace Very fun run, lifted weights for about 20 minutes after.
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