I felt lazy today and thought about just running easy as I was walking out the door. But then I thought that I have 10K race in 2 weeks, and I don't want to completely embarass myself as it will be my first race trying to score for my new club. So I decided to stick to the plan and do Tinman Tempo run.
Warmed up 1.7mi and started on the tempo. Garmin said I was running 7:50 pace, and I backed off a bit to stay closer to 8:00, but for some reason, my pace kept slipping more and more. Garmin was showing 8:15, and it didn't feel easy! A flood of negative thoughts went through my head - "what's going on?", "why does 8:10 pace feel so hard?", "I must have lost a lot of fitness", "I must have gained weight", and on, and on. I kept pushing the pace though, and finally, after about a mile, I managed to get the pace down to 8:00. From there on, I started feeling decent and got into a good rhythm. By the end of the tempo, I dropped the pace to 7:54 average (39:28 for 5 miles). Ran out of road on my loop and had to finish on the track, which was handy as I needed to do strides after anyway. Did 3x100m strides and jogged home. Finished in the dark, about 9:30PM. Still don't know what happened on that first mile of tempo, maybe Garmin was lagging.
Total time 1:06:53 for 8 miles (8:21 pace avg.), not counting strides. | 