Finding my pace!

I decided to do an experiment today. Remembering how the coached run went on Saturday, I was thinking about my running pace and the suggestion that Mama Lisa made about running even slower.

In order to be semi-organized about the experiment, though, I decided I would spend my Tuesday evening on a treadmill instead of at the normally scheduled Buddy Run (which I still have yet to actually get to on any of the Tuesdays).

I took the pace that I averaged from Saturday (18:10 per mile) and figured out that was 3.3 miles per hour. So instead of doing my normal run/walk bit where my walking pace is between 2.5 and 3 miles per hour on the treadmill and my running pace was 3.9-4.2 miles per hour, I consciously dialed the running pace back to 3.3 miles per hour and left it there, dropping into a walk of 2.5 miles per hour during my walk breaks.

And I'll be darned if that didn't work like a complete charm!!!

I'm totally stoked.

Instead of spending about 70% of the time walking and the remainder running, I pretty much flip-flopped it so 70% of the time I was running and the remainder I was using as walk breaks. My heart rate didn't get quite as high as it normally does on the coached runs, but that's actually a good thing because on the coached runs it was going up a little too high.

The best part about it was that I was able to get a couple of nice long running stretches. I know that at least one of the running stretches was 7 minutes long, more than double any of my previous running segments.

Party, anyone???? I might actually learn to run a mile yet!