Today was my first real run of consequence since the Frozen otter and since i didn't have a 'benchmark' to try to attain, i thought i'd experiment.
I did my 'no-slow-random-pro' on the treadmill at level 5 (incline between 0 and 4.3%) and a starting pace of 7:30. I channelled the road runner and made little circles with my feet. It was interesting. For the first 25 minutes it wasn't too bad - i was able to maintain a cadence of right on 100. I wanted to go a bit faster so i upped the speed to a 6:58 pace. Tougher, but not bad. My cadence dropped slightly to about 98 on any inclines over about 1%, but still not bad. With five minutes left i punched up the pace to 6:40 per mile. I was getting tired but the cadence was almost feeling natural. The last minute i lengthened my stride and hit a 6:00 pace. Thankfully it was flat.
All in all i was pleasantly surprised. It's been so long since i've done a serious run that its hard to compare the perceived exertion of this effort with my last similar effort, but i am confident that if it did feel harder, it didn't feel much harder. So i think i'll stick with it over the next couple of weeks and see how it plays out in my speed-work. One thing that was interesting is that it does feel slower - a phenomenon i'd heard is often reported when people start increasing their cadence - even though it obviously wasn't. I'll follow up in a couple of weeks.
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