Maintaining the right tempo

Thanks for making my point Newsday!

Today's run (street): 2.5 miles

My wife handed me the paper when I got home last night and told me to check out the second section. Newsday had run an article about minimalist running and she mischievously annotated the story showing the points I'd made in my "How to" post on Monday. I thought that was pretty funny.

I followed yesterday's good run with one that felt as good, but for some reason I ran the route 40 seconds slower than I did on Tuesday. It was puzzling to me, especially since my intention was to tempo at around 20 seconds above 5K race pace. After looking at my splits I saw that I simply went out too slow for the first 15 minutes but made up some time in the last third of my run. At that point I'd dropped into performance gear and run at about 8:20/mile.

I'm sure the additional rest I'd had prior to yesterday's run had something to do with my better performance. That seems to reinforce the idea that rest + training is the right combination for optimal performance.