Wednesday tempo

Not much time for a run this morning before meetings at work so I decided to make it short and sweet.

I ran my old route down by the Seine, up past the castle at Maisons Laffitte back through the park and then up to Le Mesnil past Leader Price. Having little time to train this week and needing to get some quality in, I decided to beef it up a little by making it a tempo run and seeing just how fast I could run this route at nowadays.

It's hard for an old geezer like me to start at a decent pace for a training run now. A couple of years ago, when I just started running, I would run all my training runs like this : step out the gate, set off at full pelt, get tired, slow down, finish on my knees. I've matured (at least for running) and nowadays, I set off slowly, think about speeding up, decide against it and put it off to the next day, and finish in fine fettle.

So, full pelt it was. Well actually, at -6°C it's hard to go at full pelt without having warmed up the muscles so it was a pace designed to keep out the cold. First kilometre in 4:02 and then second in 4:12. This one fast, one slower carried on for the rest of the course as I kept dozing off and then speeding myself up consciously in an attempt to keep the pace reasonable.

7.73 km all up in 31:51 or an average of 4:07 per km so a good pace overall.

P.S. actually just found my course record over this route which stands at 30:43 or over a minute faster. I can't believe it. I used to be fast in the old days: blog here.