Had intended to run after work but due to a Board meeting in London most of the team were out of the office so I decided to take a slightly extended lunchbreak (as recommended by Terry L) and get a tempo session done.
The pace of "tempo" is always slightly confusing, and even more so now I'm a bit out of practice at running briskly, so I engaged Debi in conversation this morning as to what tempo might be. Now how I expected a non-running, "well built" lady in her '40's to know about pace I don't know, and indeed the conversation proved fruitless. I started off with "what's 10k pace + 10%"? That gave an answer of 7 minute miles (assuming my 10k pace is currently about 40mins). So I decided on 6:40 - being 10k pace + 5%. Deb agreed, so off I went.
I decided that perhaps on of the reasons for my susceptibility to calf tweaks has been that I've run effort sessions after only half a mile or so of warm up, being very keen to "get on with it" - so I determined to run a full mile before speeding up - it felt interminable, but after about 8:15 I put the foot down and ran at what felt "comfortably brisk". This proved to be 6:35 for the first mile, with my HR sticking around the mid-140's.
The second mile to the turn was also 6:35 and felt ok, although Garmin did its stuff and showed a HR spike up to 187. Grr. The third felt like harder work, and looking at the half mile splits I did speed up to 6:26 pace in the first half before slowing a bit to give a 6:31 mile. I passed a colleague, Sue Wilson (known henceforth in Blogland as Wizzlon) on the way back and this gave me a little boost to do my last effort in 6:21. I turned back and met Sue then ran back to work with her, giving a good 6.25, session with a pleasingly brisk tempo section of 4 miles.
I was running without my trusty compression socks, and whilst both calves are a bit tight there don't seem to be any after effects. However assuming I have a clean pair I'll take some for my run in Newcastle on Thursday night.
Good sesh, today - pleased.
No comments:
Post a Comment