So, about that "tempo run" I mentioned yesterday...this is going to sound like coy bulls***, but I really tried to go into today trying to keep the race as a workout. This was my third hard workout in six days off of a few weeks of higher mileage (high for me, anyway). To say I didn't go into today thinking, "Hey, let's run a PR," would be an understatement.
However, the race was on the Capital Crescent Trail, one of the better examples of a false flat if there ever was one; the first half of the race today was a long gradual downhill, and the second half of the race was a net gradual uphill. My goal today was to run goal pace for Cherry Blossom next month. I think (hope) I still did that.
Consequently, given the target pace, when I thought I took the race out in what I believed to be ~5:15, I was considerably surprised to see a 4:55 first mile.
"Whoops. OK, too fast..." This definitely didn't feel too fast. I thought that this must be because of the gradual downhill.
Mile 2: 5:01. Interesting. And still too fast. At this point, I had put a gap on a few guys who were with me through the first mile, and I was just chasing Matias on his bike and trying not to body check runners and walkers who didn't heed his warnings to step to the right (which a lot of people interpreted as "stand in the middle and weave."
Mile 3: 5:01. Again.
I eventually hit the 5k turnaround in 15:31, which before last weekend, would have been a 5k PR. I then thought that surely I was going to slow in the second half because I still felt totally controlled, just as a tempo run should. When I hit Mile 4 in 5:07, though, I started scratching my head.
Rather than go to the well, I just tried to keep an even effort from this point onward, which makes sense because my next two miles were in ~11:00. I guess this suggests that I may have had a little help in the first two miles from the downhill. I finished feeling fairly cool and collected in 32:16, which is about a 2-second PR. I'm feeling good, and it's foolish to complain about a PR, even if it "wasn't supposed to happen this way."
At my last 10k in December, where I ran what was then my PR, I felt like I was going to throw up and/or collapse afterward. Today most certainly did not feel as hard as that, and I ran slightly faster without chasing anyone in front of me. No, today felt more like the RRCA race last year, where I intentionally ran a hard workout, albeit technically a PR, but finished with plenty of gas left in the tank.
In college, my coach used to have us run a "steady state" workout almost once per week, which was supposed to be somewhere between a true tempo run and a race. That's what I'm going to call today's effort because that's what it felt like.
This also means that I have to now stick to my plan and run this pace at Cherry Blossom next month. That seems like a long ways off right now.
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