Week 11 Key Run #2

Today's goal: 2 miles easy, 3 miles tempo pace, 2 miles easy. As a result of my last near-death experience running home over the mountains, I decided to try a new route. I ran a flat way home, passed the house, then ran farther into Oakland, and up and around a giant cemetery - trying to get some good hills in. It appears that the hill would be over 600 feet in 2 miles, which is excellent training for Big Sur. And I was very impressed with myself. Turns out that grade is not terrible, and I was able to run most of it.

I ran through some gorgeous scenery, of course with roads lacking side walks but no shortage of cars. I'm going to figure out a better way to deal with this place. But I found some amazing neighborhoods (completely forgot I was in Oakland) and saw an amazing sunset. Then met Matt for dinner at burritos. My Nike Plus only shows 6.6 miles but I forgot to have it going for quite a while at one point, so I'm pretty confident I accomplished at least 7.

In exciting and relevant news, the NikePlus dashboard suddenly shows mile splits and the paces for basically every 0.01 mile. So much more data! These splits show that I never hit tempo pace, with the closest 9'45" at mile 3. The paces go up from there, but so did the traffic lights and then the hills, so it is hard to judge.

All this new data has allowed me to look at my longer runs and confirm that I am having positive splits (hello Kaiser!). Some of this is because I tend to run hills on the back half of my runs (mostly because I ran from my house down about 6 miles to Ocean Beach). However: goal for tomorrow's long run is to start out what may seem painfully slow to me, and actually try to have negative splits. Now that I actually have more than one gear in my running (i.e. other than slow and steady), I need to figure out how to use them properly.