Slow recovery run

Simply put I've been taking the concept of 'rest days' way too seriously. Who knows when the next time I'll get to run. Clearly not tomorrow night as my father in law is coming to dinner (thankfully!). So in the last hour of sunlight I threw on the shoes and hit the streets.

My goal was to keep my heart rate below 155 bpm at all costs. So I ended up walking whenever I hit 155 and showed a considerable amount of discipline to keep an average rate of 148 throughout the run. Needless to say I absolutely adore my Heart Rate Monitor. One simply cannot run this way without the instant feedback. Perhaps I am overly technical but that's the way I am, so this is the way I train. The result is that I ran 9.13 miles (by both MapMyRun and the GPS, so that's a first!) and I felt very, very strongly that I could have continued.

However, I'd already run 20 + miles in 3 days and also had run for 1:24.09 - so I'd probably had enough...still I didn't feel tired or 'done'. Instead I felt great. This is the huge advantage to running aerobically.

At this pace I can enjoy the scenery - something that I noticed today that I 'zone out' on my typical run.

Another funny one - as I was crossing the Manhattan Bridge I really had to slow it down (but NOT walk) to keep my heart rate down. It wasn't until a couple of miles later that I realized that I was running straight into a 12 - 25 mile an hour wind. When I turned off of the protected West Side Drive, on to the causeway in Battery City Park, I was hit straight in the face with the river-level cold breeze - 'that explained my slow cross of the Manhattan Bridge' I thought. That way I ran back, I only got the wind at my back for the Brooklyn Bridge crossing.

Still 9:15 average at 148 isn't horrid. And this race was designed to clear out anything from the 10k and to continue to build the base.