Day 103

Hal is going to be mad at me... he said that I was supposed to cut out cross training during the week and what did I do? I went out and biked 20 miles yesterday... Of course I had an excuse. I was dropping off gator-aid and power-gel for my 20 miler tomorrow.

Then today I decided to follow the intermediate 2 plan instead of the intermediate 1 plan... So 10 miles at marathon pace... no problem.

Distance: 10.0 miles
Duration: 1:15:58
Pace: 7:36
HR Avg/Max: 159/176
notes:
Seems like I have a problem with pace. The plan started out easy enough... 8 minute miles. But for some reason I'm always worried that I'm starting too slow (even though I have a Garmin which tells be exactly how far ahead I am of pace) and I wound up running my first mile in 7:15. I slowed down, averaging 7:40 miles for the next 8 and then kicked in the last mile in 7:10.

So I'm happy with the run... this was my third run at this pace in the last week starting with my half-marathon last Sunday. On the other hand I'm a little worried about my inability to keep pace. My plan is to find the Nike pace group at the marathon and let them do the work... otherwise, I'm going to go out too fast and die.

As far as the quality of the run through I figured my lactate threshold to be 158-176 bmp which was my average and max of the run. I hit 158 at about the 3 mile mark so I was in the threshold range for about 7 miles (50 minutes). Hell of a tempo run.

Tonight's the Berlin marathon and they're streaming it live on NBC Universal Sports. Hopefully I can either stay up till 1:45 am or wake up and watch it because there's a good change a world record is going to be set!