It started with a good night sleep with a relatively early bedtime shortly after 9pm. I woke up just slightly before my 3:27 alarm at 3:20am, wide awake and ready to go. A couple sips of coffee and #2 was working for me. 5 lbs lighter I headed out the door to meet up with my group.
The temp was a decent 59 degrees but the air was thick with humidity. Not optimal conditions but not bad either and didn't seem to impact performance.
We took out the first mile a bit slow at 7:39, and eased into the pace with the 2nd mile at 7:09. Down to 7:02 for the 3rd mile and 6:58 for the 4th. I felt good so far and was running loose and relaxed and letting my running partner set the pace for the most part (he'd slow down 3/4 up the hills and I'd wind up passing him a bit to maintain pace).
Hitting mile 5 I must have picked up the effort a bit because it split in 7:03 pace despite the elevation gain. I tried to maintain that effort through mile 6 and hit it in 6:48. 10K and I was still feeling really good and was ready to start pushing. Up another long hill for mile 7 I continued the effort and split it in 6:56.
Tuesday I turned around at the top of the hill and wound up averaging 7:01 for the 8.34 mile run. Today, I figured I'd run an extra mile and give myself more time to go under 7... Cresting the hill towards the 7 mile point I clapped my hands. It was go time!!!
Mile 7 to the turn around point... I lost a bit of momentum at the 180 but quickly recovered. One last small uphill and then a large downhill. I was cruising now and hit the 8th mile in 6:33. One more mile to go I found the next gear and pushed it. By 8.75 I was hurting and could feel it in my stomach. I rode the pace line, not quite dipping into the true pain zone. Hit mile 9 at 6:23! Felt good to finally dip under 6:30. Let up a bit after 9 and finished up the final .35 at 6:28 pace.
- I ended up with a new Strava 5K PR of 20:28 which was only 3 seconds off the 20:25 I ran at Old Settlers Day last year (as well as some additional top efforts).
- After the run I still feel pretty good and wound up going for a walk when I got back home and doing 36 pullups and 50 push ups.
- This wasn't my fastest run of the year but it was definitely close to a top performance.
- The 6:23 was a nice confidence booster too... seemed like I could get down to 6:30 at the end of a run but would never see anything under.
- Strange but suddenly my HR is going higher then before without a bunch of pain. For a while there I was doing fine in the 150-low 160's range but anything that got my HR much over 160 really hurt and also even when I did push it was like my HR didn't want to go higher. Today I was up to the 170s by the end and I felt fine. Hills have been much easier too and seem to correlate to the HR.
- I was worried I was peaking/overtraining/plateauing but after today I feel like I'm reaching a new level of fitness.
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