Tuesday run

Five easy miles in Riverside Park (beautiful weather, too--upper fifties, sunny--short sleeves!).

Hmmm, the fact is that once you're more or less fit, it really is less enjoyable to run slowly than to run moderately quickly--but the double task today was (a) to honor the spirit of the taper for Sunday's race and (b) to make up for running too fast on Saturday by really concentrating on holding that slow pace. An exercise in self-discipline, in other words.

This is a fairly flat run, only a couple little hills, so it's actually much easier to hold heart-rate and pace steady than in Central Park--also easier to work on this when I'm running on my own. (But I am going to go back to using heartrate rather than pace for those long Saturday runs, I think it's easier to enforce--in fact I am contemplating setting the wretched monitor alarm perhaps to go off at 153 or so--and we will try to hold it under or at 150...)

The thing I like about this slow pace is that I kind of feel I could run like that forever! And in the end there is a certain perverse pleasure to the discipline of holding oneself back from something one really would very much like to do (I say this rather dubiously, I am trying to persuade myself--but it really is true, think how much more I'll enjoy my race on Sunday having restrained myself today...).

5 miles, average HR 140 (there, that really is 50bpm below my max, that's good), pace average 10:20.

Mile splits (I slowed it down at the end, concentrating on the HR): 9:57 (140HR), 10:03 (143), 10:04 (142), 10:16 (140), 10:38 (136).