January 02, 2012

Easy runs

The first day of the Advanced Marathoning schedule I'll be following for the next 18 weeks to prepare for the Vancouver marathon began with an 8km recovery run. I chose a lap around the neighbourhood, took my iPod but left my watch at home.

The trick with these runs is to do them slow enough.

My legs were light following yesterday's 27km. Keeping in mind tomorrow's 14km session, which includes 6km at half marathon race pace, I made sure to take it easy enough; it would have been easy to crank up the speed a little but I knew I'd regret that tomorrow.

I used yesterday's post-run time on the couch to re-read the advice on the various sessions. For example, long runs are meant to be done at between 10% and 20% below marathon goal race pace i:e. 4:15/km or 6:51 per mile, which works out to between 4:41/km to 5:06/km (7:32/mile to 8:12/mile). That means I need to run next week's 27km in 2:17, or - ideally - a little quicker.

As for my half marathon race pace workouts, I'll be targetting 4:05/km to 4:10/km. That means that I'll aim to cover tomorrow's 6km in 24:30 to 25-flat. I'll bring a heartrate monitor to track the effort. While I'm looking forward to the session, I'm also pretty sure that it will provide good motivation to take all recovery runs very easy.

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