The first run was a bit of a bag of mixed feelings. I wasn’t feeling 100% and I wasn’t sure if I should do it. I also wasn’t all that crazy about the running in general and for a moment I even thought about not running any more just keeping my calories in check for the rest of my life. But then I abandoned that thought and I realized that I actually do enjoy the running and I was just really missing it is all. I think the difference between missing the running or not feeling like ever running again can be a couple of days. So I better not miss more than a couple of days of running otherwise I just quit for good again. It’s certainly a lot easier to stay with the habit of running than to try to pick it up again and again. Hopefully this was my one and only break in my training and I can complete the rest of my spring training plan with success. If everything goes as planned I might even get up to 27+ miles in this week which would be just great!

Well today I just ran my first one of these fun runs. I started out pretty quick down the hill and up the hill in my neighborhood so I got my heart rate up to working rate fairly quick. Then I slowed down and kept bouncing up and down as I felt it. All in all I ran for 30 minutes and I put in 3.7 miles.

As you can see my speed was all over the map. I ran as slow as a 10:35/mile and as fast as 5:00/mile. My heart rate closely followed my pace while lagging a bit behind. I have tapped into my lactate threshold level several times during the run, any time you see the blue line go above 83% and stay below 88% I was in my lactate threshold level. But what’s really interesting is that while my current run’s chart looks nothing like my tempo run’s chart from two days ago my averages as very close to each other.

On Thursday I have averaged 80% HRR for the entire run, today I averaged 80% HRR as well. On Thursday my average pace for the run was 8:32/mile today it was 8:36/mile. The two are almost the same. So as you can see they were two vastly different runs which felt vastly different while running but they accomplished the same thing. They got my heart rate up in the lactate threshold zone so I could keep on improving my lactate threshold level. My training plan calls for one tempo and one fartlek run per week for the next 11 weeks so I’ll be doing a lot more of these in the near future but I probably won’t bore you with their details.