Monday, June 29, 2009

Pushing the Tempo

Today was an excellent run. The plan was to run 3 miles and I did right around that. I actually ran for 27 minutes to be more precise. I ran from the Art Museum up through Lemon Hill and then out past the Girard Avenue Bridge. I continued until my watch hit the 21 minute mark and then I turned around and headed for home.

Adding the short, but steep Lemon Hill route early on made it tough and forced me to push myself harder in the end. I need to find a better way back from Lemon Hill. Crossing Kelly Drive at the bottom of the hill is tricky with a lot of fairly high speed traffic. I'm not sure yet if it's better to add this part of my run early on or towards the end of the run.

The hill did take a lot out of me, but once I got back on the flat surface, I got into a nice groove. I put forth a lot of effort. At the turnaround point I was struggling and slowing down. I developed some side stitches. I battled on though.

I concentrated on relaxing throughout the run and continued to work on keeping long strides. It made for a fast pace and caused the running to be difficult. Too often, though I've been taking things easy and not pushing myself enough during training. I can't afford to run at this hard of a pace all the time, but I need to push myself closer to my limits more often.

Tomorrow will be a 40 minute cross training exercise. I'll get back to riding my bike. My tire is still flat so I took my old mountain bike from the parents house and swapped it with my regular bike. That could make for some interesting riding with a lesser bike. The rest of the week, I might be camping at some races, so we'll see how my schedule works out. I'm very happy with the way things are going thus and still looking forward to my day to day training. Today was very productive and I hope that continues.

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