Monday: The 120– yep i did it again, 10 abs

Tuesday: 6m easy 8:45/pace, 30 min legs

Wednesday: Rest

The past few weeks I’ve been running my first mile of each outing faster than the rest. I’m calling this the WTF. (From now on you should too.) It happens often in races when you go out too fast, but what better way to say what happened than with WTF? I was thinking to myself after a few miles into one of these particular positive splitting runs and i thought to myself, WTF..

Went (out) Too Fast.

I realized what I’d been doing. Chasing my old paces and times. Granted i’m not terribly far off, i’m still not quite there yet to be pushing paces. I got the image in my head of Mario Kart 64–Where you race the ghost of your best time. Does anyone remember this??

Last week I started focusing on straight up making my hard runs hard and my easy runs easy. My mantra lately has been “train to race, don’t race to train.” I’ve had a great track record of PR’ing each half marathon i’ve done, but i’ve never had a 1/2 where I felt like I raced and left my entire being on a course… If I ever want to break a 1:30 half marathon, running slower on easy days might just be the key. Sounds counter productive, but I keep stumbling on articles that suggest otherwise.

Runner’s World has plenty of articles..

And another blurb from an article at Competitor.com

This is what I’m changing as I begin to marathon train. I’m chilling out on paces during my easy days and i’m pushing for times on the speed days. When I look back at my training log I can see that I ran too fast, too often. I did feel burnt out a lot and almost all my runs were at the “moderate” threshold. Let’s cross fingers and hope that slowing down will produce a few PRs in the upcoming months.

If I didn’t slow down on easy days, then I couldn’t take pictures of these beautiful views!

How do your easy paces compare to hard paces?