Wednesday, June 29, 2011

Cadence work: Day 2

Once again today I was running with a big group, but I still wanted to work on cadence. It was tough because Julie, Jeremy's wife, who I've heard a lot about but never met, was running with us for the first time (or at least the first time when I was there). So I wanted to chat with her, and also with Chas, who has run with the group a few times but who I hadn't run with for several months.

It's tough to keep up your end of a conversation when you're also trying to count steps. I've gotten a bit of a sense of what a 180-step-per-minute cadence feels like, but not enough of one to do it automatically. My plan was to change the conversation topic to cadence. I got Rodney and Chas on board and we were all counting steps for a few minutes. But how long are you going to keep that up? Not long, it turns out, so soon we were back to talking about other things and I lost track of my cadence once again. I do think, when I was focusing on it, which was perhaps about 25 percent of the time, I did manage to maintain my 180-step-per-minute goal fairly effectively.

The run itself was a fairly easy 6-miler. I didn't feel bad, despite considerable humidity this morning. Maybe I'm finally starting to acclimatize to the heat and recover from my two marathons. I'll have a better sense of that when I run a 13-miler this weekend.

I didn't have a chance to upload my GPS record of today's run, but I think I averaged roughly an 8:15 pace.

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