Favorite Day of the Week

Long Run day is easily my favorite day of the week, and this week was no exception. I suppose one of the main reasons I have become a marathon runner is because I have always enjoyed my long runs a great deal. I have been doing 2hour+ long runs for about 6 years now and over that time have modified how I run them several times. At first it was of course just to get 2 hours worth of running in, then to run it at a decent pace of around 4mins/km, then running longer, up to 3 hours in duration. Eventually I started to run workouts in the long run, for example: 7x10mins hard 5mins medium, or 6x5mins hard off 2mins medium plus 3x10min hill, and other variations. When I joined the BCMP I started doing long runs at about 3:40/km, or 5:54/mi, which I didn't feel was quite challenging enough. Days before I moved back to BC, I was flipping through Pete Pfitzinger's book 'Advanced Marathoning,' which was one of the first books I had ever bought about running, and came across his method of running long runs. In this book Pete suggests running your long runs progressively from 20% slower than marathon goal pace to 10% slower than marathon goal pace. Running progression runs isn't a foreign concept to me but I decided I would finally implement this method and today was the first day of that plan.

For convenience I mapped out one mile, then split the run up into a 7 mile out and back, then 7 miles around my block which is 1.06mi. It broke down like this:
1mi - 5:53.2
7mi - 41:34.6(5:56.3/mi)
7mi - 39:56.6(5:42.3/mi)
7mi - 37:51.9(5:24.5/mi)
Total: 22mi - 2:05:18(5:41.7/mi)

Obviously this is a little faster than the guidelines in the book but the progression was very good and I will definitely continue to run my long runs this way. I believe the idea behind running faster as you continue the run is to simulate, in the latter part of the run, how you will feel in a race situation. It turned out to be a great workout, and I am very happy with it, however I really need to give my calves some care this week before they become a bigger problem. Anyhow, thats all for now, great start to the week.