Time flies

Is it really 2 days since my last blog entry already? Gracious me, how time flies! I haven't got much to report, so it's probably just as well that Cian produced this picture of his favourite baby sister. He even signed his artwork. Isn't that just dead cute?

As promised, I did pump up the long run to 17 miles on Wednesday. It required getting up at 4:00 am in the morning, which is the earliest I've ever set my alarm clock to. I don't think I'll run any longer runs than that for as long as I'm supposed to be back home at 6:30, because setting the alarm for 3:xx would feel too early, at some stage even I tend to say enough is enough. Anyway, the run went pretty well, but the weather wasn't quite ideal. It had cooled down even more to about 2 or 3C, and in addition to that it kept raining on and off for the entire 2 hours. There's a saying in Ireland, if you don't like the weather, just wait 5 minutes, and at the moment that's definitely accurate. It's constantly changing, but unfortunately I'm not drying out between rain showers. The bigger problem was a very thick fog. It was so thick that at times I wasn't sure if I could make out the road even with the headlamp turned on! I was still stubborn enough to wear shorts and t-shirt, but promised myself to dig out the long sleeves for Thursday. As is my usual these days I finished the last 5 miles strongly, and ran them in exactly 37 minutes, to the second the same pace as on Monday. That kind of thing keeps happening recently, and it's starting to sound freaky.

The legs felt rather tired today and I opted for a recovery run. I felt warmer than yesterday when getting up and decided to wear a t-shirt after all, but today's weather page says it was just as cold. I experienced the same merry dance of rain showers and clear skies as on Wednesday, but didn't feel too cold. The first 5 miles felt really slow, which is the point of a recovery run, of course, and I added a few strides on the way back home, partly to ensure that I keep doing them at least once a week, but also to add a little bit of variety into what was a fairly boring run. The legs actually felt better during the second half, it's like the strides woke up some of the sleeping muscle fibres, and I ran negative splits by quite some margin (8:20 pace first half, 8:00 pace second). What pleased me most was the average heart rate, which was very low. Considering that two years ago I would have regarded 8:10 pace as pretty fast, and last year it was a typical pace for my long runs, this is good progress.

21 Nov

17 miles, 2:10:04, 7:39 pace, HR 144
last 5 in 37:00 @7:24 pace

22 Nov

10 miles, 1:21:40, 8:10 pace, HR 139
including 11x100 strides