There's been some real progress this week. Frustrated with the lack of speed on Saturday runs, I did my midweek runs on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday at much elevated pace. This culminated in running 3 miles in 25:52 on Thursday, or 8:37 per mile. Which was pleasing, given the hip/buttock injury I have now been carrying for ten days. The odd thing is, the only time it doesn't hurt is when I'm running.
The weather forecast for Saturday was not good. Zero degrees, up to 10 cm of snow, and windy. On Saturday morning, the paths were clear and the flurries light, so I headed out and got it over with before it turned worse. Which it did, roughly 20 minutes in. So whether it was improved conditioning (meaning that running at higher speeds makes me run 'faster' in my slow runs), a nice cool body temperature, a determination to get running in the snow over with as soon as possible, or a combination of all three, I ran ten miles in 1:42:08 (ignore the time and distance above, the conversion between Garmin software and Runkeeper software seems to round things in a strange way). The split times were: 10:29, 10:48, 10:35, 10:47, 10:34, 10:22, 10:24, 10:00, 9:31, and 8:38. This gave me an average time of 10:13 per mile, which was 1:09 per mile faster than last week. The second half of the run was 4:18 faster than the first. At about the seven mile mark, there was a sensation of "this is quite comfortable". Hopefully, in the weeks ahead, things continue to get faster still.
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