Wed PM: Upper aerobic

Run type: upper aerobic, target HR 155
distance: 19.9 km
Time: 1:38:19
Average pace: 4:54 (4:25 when in HR zone)
Cumulative weekly km: 42.6
Weather: coolish 24 degrees and mederately humid.

So if yesterday morning was lower aerobic, then this had to have been upper aerobic. Ran from the sento to the park and half a loop for warm-up. Mika T. joined us for the first time in a long while as she has been doing a lot of mountain runs and cycling on weekends. She is just now starting to prepare for a fall marathon (still targeting that 3:15 goal). We ran a couple of slower laps discussing her situation and what she needs to do to give herself a chance at going sub 3:15. I was politely blunt in saying she is leaving it a little bit late to start when adopting such a difficult goal, but she does have a pretty decent base from the mountain running and so on, so if she knuckles down and does the work, she might be in with a chance.

After the chat we started cranking up the pace, by about which time Colin showed up. Target was 150 to 155 heart rate. The thing was, with the cooler weather we had to run quite bit harder to achieve the same heart rate as we have been running. In the end, we got into the HR150s for three or four laps and were running low 4:20~4:24/km, about 10 s/km faster than last week. Mika dropped off after two laps of that and Colin and I went through two more then half a lap cool down.

The interesting thing was that it was fairly easy to hold the pace. No problems with heart and lungs or heat build-up, but the muscles and tendons started to feel it after having rarely been working that hard in recent times. So there is no doubt that some more runs at and faster than marathon pace start to become necessary from now on.