Thursday night and I did a nice and strong long run around 11.7 miles of the Great Scottish Run Half Marathon route.

I pushed it right from the start… no exact plan pacing or negative splits  – I just wanted to run and see how I handled it.  I was nicely surprised.  🙂

A nice negative split at a reasonable pace for almost 12 miles! 😀

Following last weeks conformable 9.5 miles at about 8 minute mile pace, I thought I’d see how fast I could comfortably do nearly 12 miles.  I ran faster tonight – +30 seconds per mile… (this was possibly because I was running on my own tonight – I wasn’t chatting to Paul so I maybe could afford to push harder).

But the interesting thing me is that my heart rate was only increased by 6 beats / 4%.  My average HR was just 84% (max 92%) at the end… I think I may have room to push myself even faster?!  Not bad eh?

I’ll post a summary of the run tomorrow, but it’s got me thinking…

If I can run this fast (7:30 minute miles) in long run training, without much other speed work – imagine what I might achieve if I set up a training plan which incorporates speed work?

My usual run training for events up to marathon distance include the following types of runs:

• 1 easy run (4-5 miles)
• 1 tempo/speed work/time trial run (6-8 miles)
• 1 long run (7-15 miles for Half Marathon training)
• 1 optional extra easy run (2-7 miles)

I’ll be interested to see just how fast I can go – given the new lease of running life I seem to have got from running long, then being injured, then resting from running and doing cross training instead.

Anyway – here is my half marathon (plus 10k?) training programme for the next 5 weeks before I jet off to Chicago for 2 weeks!

Link to excel document: HalfMarathon2011TrainingPlan