Wednesday Speedwork - 18km (with a couple of PB's too!)

dannewton just finished a 18.03km run, that lasted for 100 minutes.
This run helped dannewton burn 1324.0 calories.

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Description from Strava: Another Wednesday, another day for speedwork!

And after a rubbish day in the office, it was very much needed!

It wasn't a 'bad' day as such, just really REALLY awkward. Everything took far too long, and lots of unproductive emails, but very little achieved in the end...

And it was relief to be able to finally log out, and do something else. When I say something else, I of course mean running... I don't seem to do much else these days!

Wednesdays have come to mean 'speedwork' days, and I try to something different each time, to keep it varied and interesting. However, for tonight I wanted to repeat last weeks session, as I felt I could do better lol.

Last week consisted of two longer 'tempo' intervals as part of a longer run, and personally I don't think I pushed myself hard enough in the 'faster' sections

You can see this in the below graph, there isn't a clear distinction between the slow easy sections and then the 2 harder sections. And I want there to be an obvious change of pace between fast and slow

last week's session

tonight's session

And you can see I managed it better the second time around. Not just more consistent, but I felt much more confident of holding and maintaining the faster pace this time.

The session was identical to last time, with a 4km warm up,4km tempo, 2km recovery, 5km tempo and then a cool down of 3km. Once I finished this last week, I felt I could've done better, could've given more... and todays session was better :-)

Some more pics from strava analysing my workout:

New PB's in the 10 mile, 15km and 5km distances

And it is so good to finally see some real improvements in pace/times after the last 5 months of slow and easy zone 2 running. I'm so pleased I found out about this, not just the importance of Low Heart Rate training, but also the 80/20 principle (80% slow easy runs means I able to run 20% at a much faster pace).

The best thing about this is I don't need to change anything (other than new route lol). But if I keep my effort low, my body will carry on adapting, and I will be able to keep that low heart rate while slowly improving my pace, and that will correspond to an increase in my faster pace. I just have to keep consistent ;-)

Tomorrow I will be back in the office, and praying for a more productive day, and then after work will be a slow easy 60 minute run to recover from todays hard effort. The standard rest day on Friday, and then we'll see on Saturday where my legs will take me on the long run

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If you would like to check out this activity on strava you can see it here:
https://www.strava.com/activities/10532539020

About the Athlete: Living in the UK, I am an intermittent Runner, but always striving for more consistency. When I'm not training I can be found photographing insects or listening to really loud angry music (which is the best type of music obviously!)

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