Another day, another tempo run. This is to make up for not doing it yesterday, when I should have run, because I had an annoyingly expensive dentist appointment. To everyone out there with out it: Dental Insurance. Get some. Anyway. Managed to show up on time, 5:45am, and did about a one mile warmup with the gang, followed by our usual half mile’s worth of drills. Drank some water, and tried taking a Gu this time, since I hadn’t had anything to eat.

Today my strategy was going to be a little different than last time. Gilbert had sent out some emails encouraging us to run at an 80% effort instead of the more common “Four miles at 5K pace,” feeling. Fair enough. I started out running with Leslie, and we ran out to the two mile turnaround point at about an 8:00 pace. Comfortably hard, considering the heat and humidity.

When we turned around we bumped into Amy who’d been about 20′ in front of us for most of the way out, and ran together for about half a mile. Amy’s really good at running these properly, with negative splits, and we all picked it up to about 7:15. That was about as fast as I could go without putting out a disproportionatly high effort. 80% is supposed to be about our 10K pace, and I think that this was fairly reasonable for me.

Amy actually dropped back a few paces (fair enough, she trashed me last time we did this run), so Leslie and I traded off the lead over the next 1 1/2 miles or so. She would pick up the pace going uphill, I enjoyed flying down (especially around the newly repaved Lou Neff Point turn), and we were constant on the straight-aways. Then with about a half mile to go, she started moving away. I could have stayed with her, but it would have taken a lot more effort than I was prepared to put out today. Even so, when we got to the SRV statue (200M to go), I dug down deep. Naturally, she did as well, and she still finished 2-3 seconds ahead of me.

Today’s time was, IIRC, 30:28. That’s about 30 seconds faster than last month’s run with a lot less overall effort, so that’s a good sign. Its still about 45 seconds off my PR from last year, but that was in late October when I was much better conditioned than I am now. A better comparison would be to look at the tempo for July 7th, about the same point in my fall training, when I did a 30:41 which was, at the time, a 1:17 PR.

I don’t think that I should be pushing much faster than a 7:15 pace at this point. However, next month I think I’ll stick with the 8:00 first mile, but try to pick it up to a 7:30 second mile. That would get be back down under 30:00, which would make me feel better, and if I can do that without actually getting more tired at the end of the run, I’ll know that I’m doing well. I actually felt like I could have maintained that 7:15 for another mile today, so this should be very reasonable. Let’s see how it works out.

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