Working hard at taking it easy

Today's run: 11.9 km at medium aerobic intensity. That's 40 for the week to date.

With 30 km of Ome staring me in the face and the leg being a bit sore I had no trouble convincing myself to take it out at an easy pace this morning. Once the heart rate monitor got over its usual trick of spending the first ten minutes telling me I have the heart rate of an excited chicken, I settled into mid 130s or a bit better than 5:00/km pace. I then decided I would set 140 as an upper limit for this run. With the leg soreness this was not that diffcult to stick to, in fact  iwas at 137 more than anything else, but it still felt like I was working pretty hard. It then dawned on me that this is an intensity I have been neglecting for some time now. As I approached the marathon I cut out this pace and was either running close to marathon pace, HR 150 and above, or much slower, HR 130 or so. Then, since starting back in January I also went straight at the 150ish type runs like the proverbial bull at a gate. Not to mention that faster stuff 2P had me doing. With the excellent Cool Running thread on threshold training during base building fresh in my mind, I realised that this middle part of my aerobic zone is now under trained, so even though I can run along happily at 155-160 HR, it doesn't feel much easier to be at 140; it almost feels harder. So the moral of the story is to probably get Tuesday's back to being a longer run at this intensity. Assuming I don't take a break altogether to get back/leg problems sorted.