The Mystery of Tempo

Man oh Man, it is humid out there. Today called for a double workout of 10 in the morning, with some of those miles at tempo pace and then an afternoon run of 7 miles at a relaxed pace. I felt like absolute crap for the warm-up miles of my morning run, but once I started dropping the pace, amazingly, I started to feel a little better and once I got into full stride, everything seemed to come together for me. I did this workout with a 3 mile warm-up out to a 2-mile straight path, where I did the tempo portion of the run. I started out into the wind and was able to average a 5:52 pace for the first two miles. I then turned around and with the wind at my back was able to drop the pace for the next two miles and bring the overall pace for the tempo portion of the run down to 5:44 for the 4 miles. In all, I was at tempo pace for about 23 minutes, which, acccording to the experts, is long enough to get the desired effect. In the past I've always done tempo runs for about 35 minutes, but I was never able to consistently do these in the 5:40's so I guess there's a trade-off. Actually looking back through my log from last year, I averaged in the low 6's for most of my tempo runs the last 2 years. I think the faster paced shorter runs are more of what I need right now to kind of supplement the longer slower stuff.

I think I'm starting to finally "get" the tempo run. I still can't give someone a good definition of it, but I think at least I'm starting to understand what it should feel like. Just to really butcher a famous quote from one of the judges on the Supreme Court regarding the definition of pornography, "I shall not today further try to define the tempo run...but I know it when I see it."

The 7 miles in the afternoon were not much fun considering it was in the 80's and what felt like 100% humidity. I wasn't just sweaty when I was finished, I was saturated. Nice mental picture huh? Ya know, it's not so much heat, it's the humidity.