Ah, the beautiful winter air of Salt Lake City. I actually saw a guy riding his bike with a gas mask on right before Pete took this picture. This is downtown Salt Lake, and this isn't the worst I've seen it, but you can sure see the smog in the distance! The air just smelled bad to me all day too, I could hardly stand to be outside in it at all.
Tuesday, I didn't even look at my schedule because I was so sure I just had to do a 30 minute tempo run (though, it turns out I was supposed to do a 40 minute tempo run, oops!). This is how Hal Higdon, the guy who I adapted my training plan from, defines a tempo run:
Tempo Runs: A tempo run is a continuous run with a buildup in the middle to near 10-K race pace.(Notice I said "near," not "at.")... A Tempo Run of 30 to 40 minutes would begin with 10-15 minutes easy running, building to to peak pace for 10-20 minutes near the middle, then 5-10 minutes easy toward the end. The pace buildup should be gradual, not sudden, with peak speed coming about two-thirds into the workout. (You don't need to maintain peak speed for more than a few minutes toward the middle of the workout.) You can do tempo runs almost anywhere: on the road, on trails or even on a track.
That's what I did yesterday. I did it on the treadmill (for obvious reasons), and it was really hard! My top speed was 7 which was like 8:34 or something like that. It was hard. I think I managed half a mile at that pace, then had to go down to 5 for a while. I brought it back up to 6 to finish off my run, but I still didn't quite make 3 miles during the half hour that I ran. Oh well, like I said before, I'm going to try not to get too worked up about treadmill speeds.
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