my "gutsy" run

Rickshaw · Posted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 7:12 pm

Last night I was thinking some more about the topic of "guts" or pain tolerance in running, and I really started to believe that I'm being held back from running faster by mostly mental factors, not physical. I thought that maybe all I need to do in order to run faster is to, um, run faster. So I decided to test that theory on my Sunday long run this morning.

I normally run 12 to 22 miles on Sundays along the same bike path, a beautiful route through woods along a resevoir at the base of the coastal mountains. I've been running there for about four years, and all my long runs seem to fall somewhere into the 8 to 9 minutes per mile range, with an average of maybe 8:15/mi. Anything with an average pace under 8:00/mi is "fast", and I rarely break that barrier on these long runs. My fastest times on this route were during fall 2004, when I was in peak shape, and I managed a few long runs a bit under 7:30/mi while during marathon pace runs.

I decided that maybe if I just decided to suck it up and run hard, that's all it would take. I thought I'd take a stab at breaking the 8:00/mi pace barrier, which I hadn't done in a while, and set my goal as 7:50/mi average pace for a 14 mile run. Off I went. 7:50/mi didn't feel too bad at all, although it was certainly faster than I'm accustomed to running on that route. Maybe I've just gotten used to the feel of a mid 8's pace, and automatically home in on it.

After a couple of miles around 7:45/mi, I felt pretty good, and just kept rolling along, getting gradually faster and faster. By the final few miles I was running around 7:15/mi. I finished the 14 miles in 1:45:14, for an average pace of 7:31/mi. For me, that's really fast. In fact, I've only had faster long runs twice in my life, at 7:26/mi and 7:28/mi when I was in peak form and doing long MP runs. So I consider today's run something of a breakthrough, especially considering that while it certainly felt faster than I normally do long runs, it wasn't like race pace either. Normalizing the time to 13.1 miles yields a time that's better than 3 of my 6 half-marathon races, too.

Maybe it is all mental.