Evaluation, Slow

Things started improving rapidly after Sunday's long run, just as I had hoped. The legs were still a bit heavy on Monday but I only ran 8 miles that day, which is unusually restrained for me, again. The real breakthrough came on Tuesday when I ran 10 miles and despite some fairly wild conditions with plenty of wind and some heavy rain showers, the legs felt great and the pace was 20 seconds per mile faster than for the same run just a few days earlier, for the same perceived effort and the same HR. It looks like it took 5 weeks to get the worst of Turin out of the system but that finally seems to be happening.

On advice of MC I ran an evaluation on Wednesday, when the weather had finally calmed down a bit. I already knew I was on the up but I wanted to put some cold and hard numbers onto the table (err, spreadsheet) to see where I was at.

The reason I keep wearing two watches for this type of workout is that the Garmin and the Ambit never agree on pace; the Ambit is always 5 or 10 seconds per mile slower, and if you don't believe me you can check out the respective GPS tracks here (7:00, 7:03, 7:06, 7:06) and here (7:08, 7:17, 7:17, 7:16). However, I have a whole set of old evaluations with the Garmin done over the years and want to be able to easily compare them, hence the continued use of the Garmin for evaluations.

Anyway, today's numbers came out as follows. In brackets are adjusted number, what the pace would most likely have been had I hit the target HR of 161.

       
        Mile 1    7:00   HR 162    (7:03)
        Mile 2    7:03   HR 162    (7:06)
        Mile 3    7:06   HR 162    (7:09)
        Mile 4    7:06   HR 161    (7:06)

The bad news is, that's my slowest evaluation in 4 years. The good news is that pace itself isn't the most important thing to look out for. The pace is relatively stable (yes, I've seen better) and the recovery time a lot better than I had dared to hope for (yes, I've seen better), so all in all a decent enough set of figures, though by the time I hit some resemblance of form they should be 20-30 seconds per mile faster, more stable still and with a shorter recovery time as the cherry on top. There is clearly a lot of work to be done yet. However, I do take solace from the fact that my evaluation is always reasonably close to my marathon race pace and therefore a 3:15 paced marathon should be perfectly doable in 2 weeks' time (and should not take too much out of me - thanks for your concern in that regard).

18 May

8 miles, 1:06:59, 8:22 pace, HR 140

19 May

10 miles, 1:21:49, 8:11 pace, HR 139

20 May

11.7 miles, 1:29:34, 7:39 pace, HR 153

   incl. 4 mile eval: 7:00, 7:03, 7:06, 7:06; 40 sec recovery