Adaptive Reasoning

5 miles on treadmill, 36:30, 7:18 pace

I'm somewhat afraid I'm taking this tapering business a bit too seriously. After taking yesterday off, I very nearly took today off as well. I'm just not in the mood to run. It's not the actual running, but the time commitment. I just want to be lazy and sit on the couch rather than dedicate 45-60 minutes of my life to any activity at this point. But if I let up now, I'm afraid I'll sacrifice performance.

Today's plan was to run six miles at an 8:00 pace with no elevation on the treadmill. Since the treadmill shook violently and noisily with no elevation, I upped it to 0.5 so the slight angle of the belt would act as a shock absorber. The noise differential was noticeable.

After three miles I was ready for this to be over so I could get back to Monday Night Football. I upped the pace to 7:00 so I could get the run over. After the fourth mile Julie was packing up to leave, so I decided I'd only do another mile. I try not to adapt my runs to be easier while I'm running them because I think that's being mentally weak, but I made an exception this time by reasoning that I'd at least run the last one HARD. So I got crazy and set the treadmill to a 5:30 pace to see how long I could hang on. The first quarter wasn't too bad, but I was feeling it by the half mile mark. I pushed through and felt fine once I was on the final quarter mile "lap" and could "see" the finish line.

So there you have it, I clocked a 5:30 mile. Yes, it's on a treadmill which is probably wildly inaccurate. But even if the outdoor, measured equivalent to this run is 5:45, this is still significantly faster than the 5:55ish I ran in high school for fun. So this is yet another confirmation that I'm in the best shape of my life. (The other people in the gym may disagree based on the post-run hacking.)

Dallas is days away, and I'm sure that an isolated 5:30 mile has no effect on my training, but it's a confidence booster if nothing else.

8:00, 8:00, 8:00, 7:00, 5:30