My Point Exactly

I did a 35-minute recovery run yesterday after work. I headed out, not fully in the mood, but excited that it was supposedly a very nice day out that I had not yet experienced.

The run is called the "Suckcess Run" on NRC. I've always enjoyed the guidance behind this run because it's all about how some runs just suck and there is no rhyme or reason for it. You may have slept, ate, stretched, and mentally prepared yourself well, but the run just sucks. Everything could be aligning for you - the weather is great, you remembered your water bottle, and you're taking a nice trail, but for some reason, your body is not having as good of a time as you expected.

I love hearing Coach Bennett walk through this, because it's one thing if you've experienced it and another thing when you learn from a well-respected coach and big-time runner that this is normal and will happen. He asked us to think about some of our worst runs and determine the common denominator. While I didn't figure that part out, I did laugh at the fact that when I think about one of my worst runs, I think about a 1.9 mile run I did back in May/June. You'd expect that the suckiest runs would be some of the longer ones, and there definitely are some for me, but over the past few months the one that stands out the most was 1.9 miles. The distance even sounds odd, but I believe it was a 3K run. This was right when I started running again so 1.9 was still longer than I had run recently, but it's not an impossible distance. I won't get into the details right now because I have yesterday's run to discuss, but those 1.9 miles were some of the worst miles I've run, leading to a migraine and a lot of discouragement about training for a marathon.

Anyway, yesterday's run did not suck. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and this run proved my point from my previous post so perfectly it's almost comical. This was another recovery run, so I was just running. I started off sluggish, with my legs feeling a little heavy from Wednesday's workouts and thinking I'm moving a tad slower than I wanted to. However, at some point, it just went away, as I had supposedly warmed up. I never looked at my watch again, but I could tell my pace was increasing. The goal for almost every recovery or long run is to end faster than you started but without increasing your effort. This may seem contradictory to all my discussions on not increasing pace but there's a difference between intentionally and unintentionally speeding up. You want to have negative splits. You want to start the run at the slowest speed and if you run right, you should naturally pick up the pace. I guess that happened to me yesterday. By the time I had turned around (I did the typical East Side to West Side Highway run) I could tell I was moving at a pretty good speed. When Coach said we only had 5 more minutes left, I was genuinely surprised. The run had flown by, and I hadn't been thinking much about it. I was listening to his guidance and observing the other runners and just running.

It turns out, my overall pace was 9'43. Told you I ran my speed run wrong on Wednesday. When I saw the pace and noticed how completely normal I felt after the run, I knew I had truly sold myself short the day before. I looked at my splits for this run because I knew this was a good one.

Mile 1: 10'33

Mile 2: 9'43

Mile 3: 9'19

0.60/1 Mile: 9'02

And this is exactly what I want to see after a recovery or long run. The first mile was the slowest of the run. Good. I increased my speed by about 30 seconds each mile. Great. I ended the run feeling like I exerted the correct amount of effort. Fantastic!

For a longer recovery run, I wouldn't be able to drop the pace down by such high intervals, but it's always good to know that I have that extra speed stored away. Hopefully, this comes in handy with my long run this weekend. More on that on Saturday :)

Run #30: Thursday, August 21 - Suckcess Run: 3.60 miles 9'43 pace