A.M. -6°C (21°F) freezing fog again, I had my snout against the window hoping the sun was going to break through but finally got out the door and just got on with it at 9:50. I wanted to attack the long run today and make it a hard effort. The scenery was classic winter with rime frost giving the trees a proper Christmas appearance. I set the garmin to record the 5k splits, 7 x 5k is much easier in my mind than 35k. I tried to keep the effort even throughout, the terrain adjusting the pace. No problems with the first 20k, I have a bit of kangaroo bounce in my stride and I tried to correct this to transfer the energy into forward and not upward motion. When I started to get weary after 25k I actually thought I was running more efficiently. The series of hills before town knocked me back and now I was fighting to maintain pace. The loop had took me back into town at the 30k point and now I added the last 5k loop on. This is the point in my dreams where I can suddenly loose the dead weary feeling, prance on my toes looking awesome and smoothly finish the long run at marathon pace smiling. The reality was I lasted about 800m at marathon pace, hit a slope and died, started breathing like an old steam engine and struggled to hang in there to finish the run off. This was still my best ever long run in terms of effort and pace, an early Xmas present to myself.
The nitty gritty details: Total 35k in 2:37:12. av pace 4:29/k or 7:14/mi. 5k splits: 23:01, 22:01, 22:22, 22:25, 22:13, 22:17, 22:43.
Now for the traditional German Heiligabend dinner, this is a very simple meal of sausages (in our case vegetarian) and potato salad.
Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas! | 