Tempo run

Today's my tempo run day. Strictly speaking, in my schedule Thursday is 'anything faster than long pace' day, but in reality these are planned to be tempo runs. If I'm finding that these aggravate my ankles I'm planning to drop the tempo pace.

There's a lot I like about the Runners World Smart Coach, but from what I've seen it is unrealistic regarding its faster tempo workouts. My personal opinion is that there is no place for speed workouts, hill workouts, or overly long tempo workouts in a first timer’s half marathon training. That opinion is based on the correlation I've observed between me doing these workouts and me getting nagging injuries (100% correlation, if you're wondering). So, when I put my schedule together, I used Smart Coach to determine weekly mileage and long run distance, and then ditched all the speed workouts, and absurdly long tempo runs.

For my tempo runs, I've started with 20 min at tempo pace, with the additional km at the easy pace, around 2/3 before the tempo portion, 1/3 after. I’m now doing 25 min at tempo pace, which is around 3 miles. Today’s run was 8.4 km total, 2 km easy, 5 km at a 5:16/km pace, 1.4 km easy. It was quite slushy/snowy on the roads which made it harder than it should have been. In any event, I'm finding the tempo workout to be the hardest one on my schedule.

I had no idea 3 Days Grace would get me in trouble! I suppose if I mention that the White Stripes ‘Seven Nation Army' got me moving today I risk finding out that it is really about Attila the Hun sacking some pristine village on the Danube, so I guess I won’t mention it.