Five Seconds In Three Months

I decided back in April that I should start logging my runs.  Keeping track of mileage, pace, blood sugars, kilometres on my shoes etc etc.

I figured I had three options: I could develop my own spreadsheet, I could try to find one online or I could ask my marathon man what he uses.

I chose option three (of course) and have been dutifully logging every run into my shiny new spreadsheet.  It's pretty cool.  I alternate between two pairs of shoes and it keeps track of how many kilometres I've run on each of them. It keeps track of long runs versus intervals, races, recovery runs, easy runs or tempo runs. It figures out my pace, my weekly totals, my monthly totals and even how much further I have to run before I've run around the world.  I can even track how close I am to running to the moon.

Seriously!

Imagine how cool that blog post will be.  I've run to the moon!  Expect to read that one some point in 2064.

Anyway, after last night's easy run I entered the data and then started playing around the spreadsheet a bit to see what other cool things there were.  I found a section that figures out your average pace, per month, per type of run.  So I told it to figure out my average pace for tempo ones.  Tempo runs are the Tuesday and Thursday night ones when I run 10k and push my pace.  Scully, in case you're wondering, that does not include the hill and interval trainings we did on those Thursday nights.

So for my Tuesday, Thursday night tempo runs, the results were pretty cool.

In April, when I started the spreadsheet, my average pace was 6:17 per kilometre.

In May, it was 6:16.

In June, it was 6:12.

Not a significant change to be sure but the pace is moving in the right direction. Particularly considering that my monthly mileage has increased every month and will continue to do so.  So I'm running more AND running faster.

I remember when I started training for my first half, my pace was 7 minutes per kilometre.  As the training progressed and I dutifully did my intervals, my hill training and my long runs, my pace stuck to 7 minutes per kilometre. For the next year - my pace seemed stuck at 7 minutes per kilometre no matter what I did.  After about a year and a half of running, it began to change.

Slowly, ever so slowly, it picked up to 6:50, then 6:45, then 6:30.

And then for some reason, over the past few months, my pace went crazy.  I went from 6:30 to 6:12 in the past six months. What's even more surprising is that it doesn't feel like I'm working any harder.

I don't know if I'll be able to sustain this new pace as the training progresses but it's pretty freakin' cool for now.