Notes
Warmed up for 5K and then went straight into marathon pace. Goal was to start off relaxed and then if feeling good pick up the pace in the second half. The conditions were pretty good, only problem was a couple of 180's I had to do. Not much wind to speak of. Warm up was pretty smooth but the first km at pace felt a little awkward. By 3K I was feeling much better and running pretty relaxed. The splits started to drop and I was just looking forward to reaching 8K and then re-evaluating. I had to turn around at just past 6k and started running back. For some reason my splits started becoming quite erratic. Not sure why the 8th km was so slow. Took a Maurten in the 9th km and climbed the Lakeshore hill so wa happy with the 4:15 for that km. Really wanted to start dropping time at this point and that worked for like 3kms until I had to turn around at Coronation Park and hit a 4:16. By 10K I was working hard, in tempo mode and legs starting to tire. Cadence had picked up but I was still able to continue dropping pace despite the one 4:16 km. I knew I had enough left in the tank to finish strong so floated kms 14 and 15 and then really extended my stride and pushed the last km to hit close to 4:00 flat. Immediately went into a jog and continued home at a good clip although I was tired and knees were a little achy. Elapsed time for the entire run was an extra 2:07.
Definitely not as strong of a workout as the 10K tempo but still much better than the longer marathon pace runs I did in the fall. The positive is I finished strong, didn't cramp up, and didn't leave tempo pace. If my goal was to match the 10K tempo effort I don't know how much faster I could have gone today. I probably could have pushed more and brought myself closer to redlining but that wasn't the goal of today's workout.
Overall pace: 4:10.5
First 8K: 4:12.9
Last 8K: 4:08.3
Last 5K: 4:07.3