Wednesday morning dilemma

I lay in bed for a while deciding what to do this morning.

a) Roll over and go back to sleep
b) Get up and do a full yoga session in the lounge room (there’s a two week course on at my yoga school, so no morning classes)
c) Start cramming my medium/long runs for the marathon

After some deliberation I decided option (c) would be the go, although by this time it was 6am and I had to leave the house for work at 7.30am so it wouldn’t be that long a run. Never mind, I thought it’s better to start shorter and build up over the next 4 weeks so 15km would be enough if I could try going a bit faster than normal.

It was a perfect morning and I decided to do the usual run around Cremorne Point, which has some flats, as well as a good variety of short steep hills and long gradual inclines. I had a lot of trouble pushing the heart rate for the first half hour (I couldn’t for the life of me get it over 125bpm), but I finally managed to get used to a faster legspeed and pushed for significant portions on the flat at 4:10 - 4:30 pace. I noticed that at 4:30 pace on the flat my HR was stable around 144. Good to know as that is my goal marathon pace.

In the end I managed 15km in 1:18, average pace 5:14 and average heart rate 135.

I stopped at home, grabbed my bag, had a drink and cleaned my teeth, then ran another 3km over the harbour bridge at 5:00 pace. A good morning’s work, I’m quite happy with that! Just got to keep the midweek runs going for the next 3 weeks and I hopefully should be in good shape for Canberra. So 15km today and I’m planning to go 18km next week, then 21km and we’ll see from there.