6 Mile Long Run

This past week I’ve been pretty focused on my fitness goals, to the exclusion of gaming or much of anything else. And I think it’s paid off so far…instead of the 5 mile long run I had planned today, I actually ran 6 miles.

Yes, I felt good enough at the end of 5 miles that I decided to go for a bit more.

I feel pretty good for running 6 miles this morning. The morning started out nicely and I tried to get out early enough that it wasn’t too warm yet, but things heated up pretty quickly. We’ve been going through a bit of a November heatwave here in San Diego, with temperatures about 20 degrees warmer than typical. So this morning when I started my run at 8am, it was already 80°. Based on that heat and what I mentioned previously about slowing down a mile per minute for every 10°, I should have tried even harder to go slow.

My current target pace for long runs is 15 minutes per mile or 4 miles an hour. That would put my time at 3:45 per quarter mile. Somehow, I set my Garmin to alert me and automatically mark a lap every quarter mile so I see my time and pace fairly often. Since it was so hot, I should have started out targeting 16 minutes a mile and when the temp got up to 90° even slower – 17 minutes a mile. Which meant, rather than 3:45, I should have been aiming for 4 or 4:15 per quarter mile.

I ended up running quarter miles between 3:00 and 3:33 a way too fast for what I wanted. I really, really need to work on going slow.

I made it though, and felt good enough to run an extra mile and logged 6 instead of the planned 5. I just have to remeber that it’s more important to spend the time running rather than trying to go fast.

I looked at the Carlsbad Half Marathon information and the event has a time limit of 4 hours and 15 minutes which means a pace of just less than 19:27 would still be allowed. Even if I targeted the 17 minute pace today, it would get me over the finish line well before the street sweepers. I just need to convince myself of that while I’m running.