I’m coming to you smack dab in the middle of an awesome weekend, but I wanted to talk a bit about this morning’s run before it got lost in the shuffle of awesomeness.
Original Plan: 9 miles, 7 at marathon goal pace (9:09)
Modified Plan After About Five Minutes of Running and Feeling Tight as Hell Legs: 7 miles, 5 at MGP
I’ll admit, while I try to be tough about running and force myself out in the cold, I’m a total weenie when it comes to the rain and usually opt for a treadmill when it’s raining. I would rather run in freezing weather than in a little rain. But this morning, after sleeping in until 9, I dragged myself out in the rain to get some miles in.
Halfway to the West Side Highway, my legs weren’t feeling any looser, and I decided to stick to 7, instead of pushing myself to do 9. I’m ordinarily all for pushing myself in a run, but I have 18 planned for tomorrow and pushing myself would not have been smart.
I did an MGP run a few weeks ago, but considering it was only 4 miles and included two bathroom stops, I’m not counting it, and counting this as my first real MGP run.
I did some tempo miles at 8:30ish pace the other day that weren’t terribly difficult, so I thought I wouldn’t have too difficult a time today–and I didn’t, as in it wasn’t difficult on my legs.
The concept of a marathon goal pace run is so that you know what your pace feels like so that you can hold it on race day.
Well, kids, I still have some work to do on figuring out what it feels like. My average pace was an 8:58, 11 seconds faster than my MGP. This kind of run is absolutely a mental test of perceived effort.
I thought MGP would feel like I was running strong, but not trying to run fast, so that’s what I went for, a little too fast. I perceive an easy run to feel like a jog, tempos to feel like I’m running fast, and intervals to feel pretty close to sprinting.
It appears my perception is not my reality here. I’m interested to see if I get any better at honing in on MGP as training continues.
So many questions for you:
Do you do MGP runs?
Is 10 seconds off a big deal?
How do you hone in on the MGP while running? What does it feel like to you, in terms of perceived effort?
What’s the longest MGP run you’ve done/will do during training?