Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Training back around normal.

I haven't really posted my weekly reports, but I've been getting in some really good running. I haven't done much of any speed work again yet, but I've gotten in some solid tempo runs. My most recent long day was 16 miles and I've got 16 and 20 in the same weekend coming up shortly, which should be pretty fun, considering that I've been running my longer runs pretty hard.

This past week, I was supposed to do a 12 and was allowed to run it fairly hard, so I decided to just tack on an extra 1.1 and see what I could hit for 13.1 on a treadmill. Given that I'm running at 5000', I put it downhill at a 1% decline, which, in hindsight, now that I've run the calculation via http://www.runworks.com/calculator.html, doesn't even completely make up for the 5000' fully. Somehow I managed to hit it in 1:14:28, which supposedly corresponds to 1:11:31 for an equally downhill course at sea level or 1:13:00 for a flat course at sea level.

Do I believe I can run a half marathon in 1:13? Well, it sounds unreasonable, but the treadmill I ran on was pretty high-end and probably pretty accurate. I definitely felt like I was hitting around 5:40s (I've done a handful of tempo workouts right around 5:40, so I know what it feels like) and I think it was pretty credible. I started to feel how fast I was going pretty early and wasn't sure if I was going to hold on, but I managed to do so. I've been feeling like I'm fully recovered lately speed and endurance wise, so maybe it's possible. I haven't raced a 10 miler or a half marathon in years, so it's hard to really say that I don't think I can run around 1:13 to 1:15 in race conditions. We'll see though.

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