Oh, yeah. I’m deep into things now.
- Day 15 – 15.11 miles, 9:24 pace
- Day 16 – 16.07 miles, 11:30 pace (recovery)
- Day 17 – 17.11 miles, 9:40 pace
- Day 18 – 18.10 miles, 12:00 pace (recovery)
- Day 19 – 19.11 miles, 10:00 pace
- Day 20 – 20.12 miles, 12:00 pace (recovery)
- Day 21 – 21.08 miles, 12:00 pace (recovery)
I started this week off with my fastest paced effort of the month. It only went downhill from there as the accumulated mileage started to finally catch up with me. My legs have felt pretty decent starting out for each of the runs, however my paces just started drifting up.
I began recovery effort paced runs on even days starting on day 12. The 11:30 pace was about 20% slower than my “easy” effort pace up until that point. This obviously wasn’t enough so I slowed up on day 18. Unfortunately, this didn’t stop my pace from dropping further on day 19. I thought about that 10 minute pace quite a bit over the next couple days. It wasn’t going to take too many more of those runs at that trajectory until it got up to my 12 minute “recovery” pace. I then noticed that my run/walk split shifted on those recovery runs from walking over 50% of the time to running over 50% of the time. My effort level on all these runs felt fine, but the numbers were all moving in the wrong direction.
I considered dialing back the pace a little bit on my odd number days, then thought – what am I doing here? I don’t care what my average pace is during this project. It’s not like I have to get my runs done by a certain time. I’m retired! I had been changing paces every other day because that seemed more sustainable than doing every run at my original easy pace. Well, doing all my runs at the recovery 12 minute pace would be even more sustainable. So instead of going out today and pushing things, I kept things nice and chill. And during the 21 miles I was able to swap my run/walk ratio back over to more walking.
I came into this project with a rough outline of how I thought it might go. A rough outline based on zero experience with something like this. It’s not going exactly how I had it planned, however I’m being very intentional with these runs and attempting to change things up before I dig myself into a hole I can’t climb out of. My legs probably feel better than I thought they would at this point. This is a very good thing considering I haven’t even reached the halfway point of this month’s 500 miles.
That’s in store for me tomorrow!