Mid week runs

Yesterday was one of my favourite days at work …. our South Glasgow Cross Country Races! Each of the nine Active Schools Coordinators in the South organise our own cross country races and the top 10 from each race (P6 Girls, P6 Boys, P7 Girls and P7 Boys) go through to the final.

So 350 children turned up at Nether Pollok for the races. I was there by 7.45am to set up the course and spent the morning making sure everything went to plan. I mention this as I wondered how tired I’d be for my tempo run home!

You can just about see me briefing the runners before the start …..

Wednesday – tempo run home from work

I was able to start running at 4.20pm so there was plenty of light. I use the first mile to warm up and I quickly realised that there was no ice on the paths and importantly there was very little wind.

Surprisingly my legs left really good so I decided to push hard for my 6mile tempo run. I put my watch on the screen which shows average pace for the mile rep I’m doing and I glanced at it after I’d counted to 4 times 40 breaths.

So sometimes it would be near the start of the mile and other times near the end but it was encouraging see that it was always 6:50 or so. There were a few times when I had to dig a bit deeper but generally I was feeling strong and running smoothly.

Once home I downloaded my data and was pleased to see that I had averaged 6:52 pace for the 6 miles ….

I must have ran very evenly as all of my mile splits were between 6:50 and 6:54 which doesn’t happen to me very often!! Interestingly my HR went up a bit for the last miles so I must have been working a bit harder to keep the pace.

Thursday – run to work

I’m really enjoying my pattern of running back to work as I’m using this run as a recovery/easy run so if I start to feel it’s a bit hard I ease off, have a look around and just enjoy the run.