Bouncing Back

There’s one more snippet from Sunday’s marathon that I forgot to mention, and then I’ll stop boring you with it. When I mentioned to Niamh that “one day I'll run a half-marathon that’s not full of hills”, she dryly responsed “not in Ireland!”. She’s probably right. I think Longford has a flat course, but I’m unlikely to ever drive 4 hours each way in order to run 13 miles (I might be tempted to do the full marathon though).

My recovery is coming along very nicely indeed. I put in a third recover day in a row on Wednesday, but noticed that I was floating along a lot faster than the day before, but with the same effort, and the same heart rate. In fact, I think my heart rate for the same pace has dropped again. This is something I have noticed after a lot of my races, especially half marathons. Once the initial tiredness has worn off, my heart rate returns to a lower level than before. The same seems to be happening again. All in all I managed 10 miles at a bit slower than 8:00 pace. The run was unusual because the return leg was slower than the outward segment. That was not down to me getting tired, I was just making sure to keep the effort nice and easy. It was still faster that what I had expected.

Since I felt so well, I decided it was safe to do a few miles at marathon pace today. I ran yet another 10 miler (that has become my standard distance over the last few weeks), and after 2.5 miles I turned the screw. Once more I got the effort wrong in the early stages, when I reached the turn-around point I calculated the pace and realised that I was doing 7:00. I slowed down, but got it wrong again, this time I slowed down too much. I noticed the error and tried to correct, but once more I lost my focus and didn’t keep at the pace. All in all, the return leg was done at 7:27 average pace, though my real pace was rather uneven as I kept speeding up and slowing down in a vain attempt of tuning into the right pace. Oh well. I averaged 7:17 over the 7.5 faster miles, which is very close to the desired effort, even though I never seemed to run at that pace.

While I was less than pleased about the way I had executed the workout, I was much happier with the way it had felt. Even 7:00 pace had felt very comfortable, and 7:27 pace was downright pedestrian. I guess three recovery days in a row will do that to me, and the legs thanked me for it.

Of course I could not resist putting my half marathon time into McMillan’s calculator, and it came up with a marathon time of 3:05:19, 7:05 pace. After a run like today I can nearly believe that I could run 7:05 for the entire 26 miles, but I have never come close to my predicted marathon time in the past. Last year was a good example of that, after a half marathon time of 1:35:42 the predicted time came out as 3:21. While my goal time was 3:30, I secretly hoped to be able to come at least close to 3:21, but it wasn’t to be. I ran 7 minutes slower than that, and only after giving it all. There’s still something that’s stopping me from running close to the predicted times (which generally are very accurate for anything up to half-marathon), and I’m not sure if it’s in my head or in my legs.

12 Sep

10 miles, 1:21:48, 8:10 pace, HR 137

13 Sep

10 miles, 1:15:06, 7:30 pace, HR 150
2/5 @ 7:00, 5 @ 7:26 (= 7.5 @ 7:17)