One of the things I've been looking forward to about training with Team Rogue is to see how my body/pace responds to the high mileage. My normal easy pace has been somewhere between 9:00 and 9:30, depending on my overall fitness and mileage.
I remember reading all of the blogs of folks who participated in the high mileage build-up last summer being a wee bit jealous that their easy pace kept getting faster and faster. I was doing so much quality/speed work over the summer that I had trouble recovering in time to bump up my easy run pace. Every easy mile felt slow because my legs were always recovering from some brutal workout on the track.
Now that I'm building up my mileage without all of the quality workouts, I'm finding that my easy pace has started to drop...as in getting faster. The past 3 runs that I've done have been a 16 miler, a 6 miler, and an 8 miler. I did these three runs in 8:58 pace, 8:48 pace, and 8:55 pace respectively.
Do I expect every run to be under 9:00 pace? No, definitely not. However, I'm excited to know that three runs in a row have felt okay and have been surprisingly 'fast'. Hopefully my legs will continue to feel strong enough after this 60 week...70, 80, 86, 90, 90, 90...
2 months ago
2 comments:
You will be surprised Sadie. With no speed work for a while to tire your legs out you will be able to get stronger on your long runs. I let the runs happen - if my legs want to run faster, I let them...to a point (sometimes I do have to focus on slowing down) and if they feel tired I run at a pace where I am comfortable and not pushing. I averaged 8:15 for a 24 miler last Saturday. It wasn't pretty at the end but it wasn't supposed to be!
don't be surprised if you do infact end up going under 9 fulltime. I / we went from 8:15 to 8 to 7:45 over time and had to restrain ourselves from going faster than 8's on our cool down miles.
Does it last forever? I dunno, yet. Right now I'm back to 8 +0-15 seconds, but it may be because I've been running on TIRED legs from a very long and hilly 4.5 hour trail run gearing up for Bandera 50km this weekend.
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