At lunchtime it was my tempo run. I had time to squeeze about 7 miles in if I kept to something around 7:30 pace. As I warmed up I was thinking it was going to be hard, my legs were tired and I felt very stiff from the mileage of the last few days.
A quick stretch and I was off, heading down the Nickey Line towards Hemel. I thought that it would be an easy mile to break me in and a good test to see if I could hit the pace. My idea was to keep my heart rate in the 150's knowing that it was uphill on the way back and I'd stray into the 160's and maybe 170's.
The pace was very comfortable and I held the heart rate down.
I passed a couple of stray gel wrappers dropped by fellow runners and decided that I was picking them up on the way back. Can't have our tribe dropping litter in the countryside.
After passing through the M1 tunnel I soon reached the 3.5mile mark and did an about turn. Most of the next 3.5 miles would be uphill and it would be a good test to see how my pace and heart rate coped.
Overall it wasn't too bad. With about a mile to go the heart went to 165 and stayed there until the end. 165 is still under my lactate threshold so I'm quite happy to be running 7:30's uphill at that level. In my 2010 marathon I was running above lactate threshold from mile 1 and came undone at mile 18 when the legs just seized up as the lactic acid built in the muscles.
This was a confidence boosting run, averaging 7:19 pace over 7 miles at a comfortable heart rate, and especially as I was feeling weary during the warm-up.
Tomorrow the plan is for some easy miles - over 9min pace all the way. Then on Sunday I'm not sure whether I go for another 20 or ease off for a week. We'll see.
Oh yeah, in the end it was 3 gel wrappers collected and shoved in the bin. Don't be a litterbug out there.
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