Notes
Ran my long run mid-week to make room for weekend travel. I'm trying to use these slow runs to improve my running economy. That basically means running as fast as I can at a low heart rate. I slowly dropped the pace from 8:46 for the first mile down to a little over 8:00 for mile 5, keeping my heart rate between 144 and 146 as much as I could. Then a curious thing happened: between miles 5 and 10 my pace continued to get faster, bottoming out at about 7:50 or so, without my heart rate going up. Cool! The trail is fairly flat, so terrain wasn't really too much of a factor. Maybe it just took that long for all my various systems to fire. Anyway, if the rest of my long runs go as well this summer I'll consider myself blessed.