So last Tuesday was my long day for the week. I truly enjoy my long run days most of the time for a few reasons. I don't try to kill myself with the pace, so usually it is a fairly comfortable pace that is setting and pretty relaxing. Also my long runs more than any other run help me see how much I have improved, going from sitting on the couch all of the time to now running 9 miles in a single run. I also know that adding more miles is the best way to help further improve my running and this is perhaps my single most important run of the week.
That said, I sometimes get bored running the same routes and end up looking for new routes to take. For a while, i was measuring out routes with google maps, but lately have been just letting mapmyrun pick a route for me. It has a "route recommender" feature on it that you can put in your starting location and the distance you want to run and it will help recommend a route for you. A few things to keep in mind however is that it really does not take elevation into consideration when recommending the route, so I have had a few that ended up being pretty rough courses for me to take. Probably not something that I really want to do for my long runs, but whatever.. its just running
So my current training plan that I am on for my upcoming 10k has my long run at 5 miles for the week, but I had planned on just putting it at 6.2 anyways, since that is what I had been running and I did not see any reason to drop it down a mile. Plus I like the 6.2 distance to help me get a feel for how much easier running 10k is becoming for me.
So I popped in the route recommender and went off running!
One interesting thing that I noticed from this run, I had a hill that was both steeper and higher than the hill I did the previous day when biking. I had no problem running up this hill at a decent "easy pace" for myself, where the easier hill on the bike the day before was a chore. I guess that shows how much better that my running has gotten and how it does not transfer directly to biking.
Another thing I encountered on this run was at the last mile or mile and a half, I was on a highway that had horrendous wind.. 20mph wind with 30-40 mph wind gusts pretty much pushing directly against me while I was on a small incline the entire way. It was pretty tough after 5 miles to have the leg strength to push through that and only then I found my pace slipping back to right around 12:00min/mile. I think I'll take hills over strong wind any day after that.
Because of the wind and the hills, I didn't break my best 10k time, but did still make it my second best 10k time which is good to see on such a difficult run for myself.
I also found that someone had created a "segment" within Strava (one of the apps I use to track my running) for the big hill that I ran up. I ended up 4th on the leaderboard for that segment during this run. The hill they measured was 88ft incline in 1/2 a mile (4.3% average grade).
Don't get too excited for me though, I am 4th out of 4
The first place on that leaderboard did that hill 2 minutes faster than me, which is almost half the time. And it was not like he was just sprinting up that hill, it was only 1/2 of a mile of a full 6 mile run that he did where his entire pace was faster than my normal interval training pace.
Anyways...
6.2 miles in 1 hour 11 minutes