It's been excellent to witness Andy's running- and literary re-birth whilst running without a watch recently. Incidentally, I hardly ever run watchless myself, Andy, but I knew it would do you good. The once or twice I have done it, it did feel great, honest....
I've been intrigued about this idea of base training, and have read up about it a bit recently on Greg McMillan's running site (
http://www.mcmillanrunning.com) which, incidentally, also has a fantastic race prediction calculator. As a dedicatedly one-pace runner, I hardly ever (intentionally) train at slower pace, but finally decided that the time had come at least to try practising some of what I have preached in the past.
So two days ago, I ran my lunchtime circuit pretty darn hard. It took me 47 minutes, and guessing the distance at 5.5 miles, that made 8:33 miles. Yesterday I took a rest day, purely in the interests of science you understand, then today as an experiment, I ran the same route but more slowly. I really tried to run very easily, making an effort to stay relaxed and to keep the speed down whenever I was tempted to speed up. The conditions were similar, and my time: 48:15 or 8:46 miles.
As an exercise in slowing down, it was pathetic. I ran slower than this over the same route for most of the summer (admittedly, it was much warmer then). But the other, more important result, was that it felt terrible. Just terrible. For a start, it seemed much more boring. The time dragged all the way round. And after just two miles, my legs felt like lead, with my shoes seemingly glued to the tarmac. The glue persisted right to the end of the run. It's a sensation I've only previously experienced in the last six miles of a marathon, or on one of the nightmarish 20 milers preceding one. Possibly because as Debbie says, this is the pace you run at that stage of a marathon when you begin to burn fat rather than muscle glycogen for the first time.
All this has set me seriously thinking. I'm going to try to introduce a regular slower run into my routine. Obviously, to play it safe, I'll limit this to just one a week for the moment, since clearly I'm not yet fit enough to manage more. But perhaps eventually I'll be able slow it down another 15 seconds a mile. Another minute a mile slower seems an unlikely prospect right now, but with luck I might get there in a few months if I really work at it hard enough.
Debbie's right - it's much harder to run slower. Try it out. It's certainly given me food for thought, and it might even make me a better runner at the end of it.
