Running easily

Part of the reason for doing the JW Ultra, was to spend a decent amount of time thinking about and practising running using minimal effort for the pace. There are many schools of thought about this and I have looked in some depth at many of them. In different ways, they all aim for the same thing - to give runners the tools to run as efficiently as possible.

Today, with there being no chance of a run during the day with Lorna, I decided to do one of our 'bread and butter' 8 mile loops - the Long Tesco Loop.

Anticlockwise - because I prefer it in that direction..!!

This is a cracking little run. It is undulating in a Flat Run kind of way and there are very few road crossings and junctions to worry about, which makes it an ideal run to simply get into a nice rhythm and run!

My legs were feeling nice and springy, testament to the fact that the 29 and a bit miles of the JW hadn't taken too much out of them, and I'd planned to pace myself at 8:00-8:30 pace as long as it felt really easy.

It did!

I use my breathing - depth and rate - to gauge my intensity level. And I started off at 4:6 and 6:8 - and reasonably shallow.
The hardest I worked corresponded to 4:4 and that was up the one steeper undulation on the route. So I was taking it really easy.

That gave me the opportunity to look and work at my form. Light steps with a short stride and a high cadence, relaxed body, and 'peeling' my support foot off the floor to subsequently place it gently back down again.

I was really surprised that I was finding this as easy as I was. The only residual 'niggle' from Saturday being a slightly tender inner ankle/arch which I'm now pretty sure is just a little bruising from the uneven ground, and I didn't even notice that until I reached 7 miles.

This was a fabulous run.
The weather was perfect - sunny with a cooling breeze.
The Traffic Gods were on my side too, with favourable lights and relatively low volumes of vehicles on the roads.

The numbers:

8.04 miles
1:05:02
8:05 min/mile

Splits: 8.01 - 8.01 - 8.01 - 8.07 - 8.11 - 8.03 - 8.07 - 8.09

Enjoyed that!