A really lovely one, for some reason it was just excellent, only now I have idiotically but thoroughly counteracted its good effects by wrestling for half an hour with the wretched Polar Weblink--I finally got the data onto the computer, it was being particularly temperamental, but the numbers are clearly wildly implausible, I do not know what happened. A lesson to me not to depend on mechanical devices!
Anyway it was just great, not cold at all (40ish?). S. sensibly suggested five instead of six, and I suggested slow instead of fast; we sort of went at a better clip than was quite intended, but it was super-enjoyable, well worth it. HR low to mid-150s, don't really know about pace but probably sort of 8:30-9ish, phasing faster and then slower again--probably hit around 8:15-8:20 for a mile and a half or so.
I must say that really I have S. to thank for at least a minute of that 10K improvement. (May: 54:10, 8:44 pace; December: 51:33, 8:18 pace. Same [hilly] course.) There are other reasons my time dropped so much between May and now (I'd only been running a couple months again post-injury at that point, and I've certainly trained very consistently since May and with lots of sensible cross-training), but a big part of it is that running with S. keeps me honest about certain things--namely that speed matters!
I really love the mix of having long slow ones at a pace as much as a couple minutes per mile slower than the mid-week runs, but S. is significantly faster than me in a way that really makes me push myself on these Tuesday evening ones--I cannot let myself off the hook by saying "Oh, I am just good at endurance stuff, I have no turn of speed!"
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I was explaining to my mother tonight why M is such a slow swimmer. I had four reasons. Let's see: 1) she didn't swim for two years, and most of the kids in her age group have been swimming straight through; 2) she is small and not that strong; 3) she doesn't care about being fast (!!); but I think the most important is 4) she is swimming with younger kids (because there are so few kids her age on the team, so they all either swim up or down), and she is the fastest, so she is never challenged and never has to push to keep up. This is, I think, a problem (though not really, as 1) she doesn't care, and 2) she is enjoying herself enormously).
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