As it's my taper week for Sacramento I only did a 1x3mile tempo run this morning (instead of the normal 2x3miles). Easy warmup mile then tried to focus on running steady tempo effort without worrying too much about pace. In the past I've not been too good at running by feel and always tend to go faster than I should.
Felt good for the three miles, trying to keep things "comfortably hard". Looked at the data afterwards and was very happy with the splits. Heartrate figures for the 6 half mile splits were...
1 - 159 ave, 162 max
2 - 159 ave, 162 max
3 - 160 ave, 161 max
4 - 160 ave, 161 max
5 - 161 ave, 162 max
6 - 159 ave, 161 max
Pace was 6:52 average, ranging from 6:45 to 6:59 (it was an slight uphill/downhill route).
When I look back to the week before my last half marathon in April, I ran a 4 mile pace run on the Wednesday at 7:04 pace - average HR was 162 and the weather that day was cool and cloudy. I'm now running 12 seconds faster at similar HR. Weather forecast for Sunday looks good - cool, little wind, it's a fast course, and I'm feeling in great shape, so I guess that means it is half marathon goal time....
1) Finish the race without thrashing my achilles (or anything else).
.... This is to absolutey prove I've recovered from my injury.
2) Beat 1:34:11 - this is my current half PR (short course). 7:11 pace
.... I'll be disappointed if I don't meet this goal.
3) Beat 1:32:50 - time predicted from my 10k - 7:05 pace
.... this is my realistic goal
4) Beat 1:32:00 - this is 7:01 pace
.... this is my "within limits" stretch goal
5) Beat 1:30:00 - that's 6:52 pace.
.... this is my "aint-gonna-happen" stretch goal
I think I will pace at 7:00 (for goal 4) and see how it goes after 5 miles. If I'm comfortably thru 5 miles in 35 minutes with HR under control, I'll go for 8 miles in 56 minutes. At that point if it's ugly I could jog it in at 7:25 and still run a PR of 1:34. if I'm feeling good bring it home under 1:32. I would be really happy if my average pace was under 7 minutes. Don't see any scenario where #5 can happen.
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