The plural of "tempo" in Italian is "tempi." My training schedule this week had me running a moderate-paced 8 miles yesterday and a 5-mile recovery run today. So naturally that means I actually ran a hard 5.5 yesterday (plus warm-up and cool-down) and a hard 6.38 today (with no warm-up or cool-down). That's okay, it makes up for the 3 X 1600 meter intervals I won't be running tomorrow.
What made me do it? Peer pressure. Tuesday and Wednesday mornings are DART group runs, and both yesterday and today, some folks showed up who wanted to run fast. Yesterday, it was Jeremy and Matt, and today it was Adam. Yesterday, after I warmed up with the 1.39-mile run into town, we started out at about a 7:45 pace, and just got faster with every mile. By the end, Jeremy and Matt left me in the dust and I "decided" that my last three-quarters of a mile would be a cool-down while they cranked out something like a 6:30 pace for the final mile.
Today, I told Adam I wanted to take it easy, which ended up being around a 7:30 average pace for the whole DART loop, with a 7:10 thrown in on one of the miles for good measure. Uh, I don't think that counts as "easy." While neither of these runs was quite at race pace for the 10K distance, but they were both hard efforts—solid tempo runs.
With just a week and a half to go before the Steamboat Marathon, I'm getting into serious taper mode, which means shorter runs of equal intensity. Tomorrow I won't be running at all—I'll use my spin class as a cross-training recovery effort. My long run on Sunday will be just 13 miles, and all next week I'm only doing recovery runs. So this week I'm only going to log about 38 miles, plus an hour-long spin class that's roughly the equivalent of a 6-mile run. Next week I'll do even less, only about 28 miles before the race. The idea is to be well-rested, but not lethargic, come race day.
Details of the past two days' workouts are below:
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