Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day to all fathers and fathers to be and to anyone that has a father.

Saturday: Did a 10k race. I wasn't really planning on doing this race, but I woke up on Saturday morning, changed into my running gear to go for a 4 mile recovery run when for a brief moment convinced myself that I should go racing instead. The next thing I knew I was in my car driving to the race. The 10k race in question is called the Run the L ake 10k and coincidently enough runs along a waterfront trail by Lake Ontario. Split times are as follows.

KM	Lap Time	HR Avg
1	03:48.0	173
2	04:23.4	185
3	04:45.5	187
4	03:50.8	185
5	04:29.5	185
6	04:38.6	186
7	04:34.6	184
8	04:40.9	185
9	04:25.4	186
10	04:34.0	185

Final time of 44:11. Not really too happy with the time. I was kinda hoping to be in around 43 minutes. I thought I was doing the first km at a fairly easy pace, but hit the first marker at 3:48 which is a lot faster than the 4:18 I was targeting and it was basically a struggle after that. I hit the 5km mark at 21:17 and I tried to slip into a relatively comfortable 10k feel, but all the km after that were too slow. I was trying to run this by feel and I had covered up the HR reading on my watch. If I had known that my HR was at around 185, I think I could have pushed it a bit more to 190. The problem I realize now was that a 4:18 pace was foreign to me. I had no concept of what it should feel like since I haven't been running this at all during training. Also I was slipping into a sloppy type of running. I've recently been trying to concentrate on leg turnover since I think that's the only way I'm going to get faster. I only managed to count my leg turnover once during the race and it was at 164 strides/min. I've been trying to target 170 at a minimum for all my runs and my LT's are usually at 180. I think this was a clear demonstration of my sloppy running since my HR was higher than when I do my LT runs, but my pace was a little slower.

Anyhow, I'm not completely disappointed. I placed 3rd in my AG so I got a medal. The current results also list me as 10th overall, but I'm pretty sure that's wrong since I distinctly remember one girl who passed me and finished ahead of me but there aren't any females listed in the top 10.

Today: With the race yesterday, I decided to do todays long run at the slow end of my long run pace at around 8:45 min/miles. I made the stupid mistake of not drinking enough water yesterday and while running and I was dehydrated by the end of todays run again. I was going to do 15 miles today. I had serous thoughts of quiting after climbing a bit of a hill at mile 13, but ended up struggling through another 1.5 miles to finsih at 14.5 for the day.

Lap	Lap Time		Lap	Lap Time
1	09:13.6		9	08:50.0
2	08:56.9		10	08:53.1
3	08:45.1		11	08:46.1
4	08:38.3		12	08:46.7
5	08:35.9		13	08:59.7
6	08:42.9		14	08:44.9
7	08:53.7		15	04:24.7
8	08:45.3

Total for the week is a little over 43 miles. Week 4 of of the 18 week training plan is to come as follows:

Tuesday: 8 miles including 10 strides
Wednesday: 5 mile recovery
Thursday: 10 miles
Saturday: 4 miles recovery
Sunday: 17 miles

Have a good week all!