I Wanted It To Feel Easy.....But It Didn't

My plan last night was to stop on my way home from work and run a race pace type 5k at Pineland. I suspected I would feel a bit tired but at the same time thought it would feel somewhat easy in comparison to technical trail running.

I was prepared for comfortably hard effort with hopefully a respectable pace. It seemed with the rest I've had in the last couple weeks that I would be happy with the results. I figured starting out more quickly rather than warming into the projected effort would bother me some at the beginning but that I would settle in during the first mile.

As it turned out, I didn't feel that good at all. I felt slow, tired, out of breath and disapointed. it didn't help that my heart rate monitor didn't work because I use that info to see where I am acually at compared to how I feel. Judging by percieved effort, I accomplished race pace......yet my time was so slow and disapointing that I was embarrassed for myself.

At about 2 miles, I decided I was going to stop at 2.5 and then run a cooldown. I pushed into a simi kick near the 2.5 mark, stopped running which only lasted about 10 seconds before I mentally kicked myself in the butt and decided to finish what I started......hey, it was only 3 miles, what was I thinking.

At three miles (on the garmin) I switched gears, gave it everything I had and put down a pretty good kick. Once finished, I was glad that I didn't stop at 2.5 miles and even though my time for this run was terribly slow, it would give me a platform to start on and improve.

When I ran my fastest times (back in 2002-2003) I rarely ran at any pace other than race pace. All my runs were essensually a race and I only ran 3-4 times a week at 2.5--5 miles each averaging 12-15 miles a week at most. There was no such thing as a long slow run in my training and every run ended with an all out kick.

I did a 5:45 mile (in training at track)1 mile race PR 6:18, my 5k PR was 20:18(6:33p), 10k PR was 44:06(7:07p) 1/2 marathon 1:37:26(7:27p)... Perhaps to get back down to that speed I have to revert back to my earlier training.

I know it sounds like I am saying I want to get back into road racing but that is not it at all, I just want to enjoy running faster, like I used to. I guess I will have all winter to figure out what I want for spring.

10/05/10
5k race pace run

Garmin............Nano
3.1 miles........3.81 miles.....estimated miles 3.3 @30:54

splits:
Garmin.............Nano
9:41..............8:39
9:48..............8:26
10:44..............9:40
7:04..............6:49

2 mile cooldown

I guess what this run proves is that training long slow distance creates slow times...