Wave Tempo & 80/20 Running

Hi there.  It's been a while, so I wanted to post something. It's about 6 weeks until the 2017 Rocket City Marathon (hoping to BQ with a 5-minute buffer), and 2 weeks until the Huntsville Half.  I am going to mostly talk about my long run today.  But before I get into that, let me share about the last few weeks going into today's long run.

Even since it started to cool down for the fall, I started playing with some "speed work" which mostly was running at Goal Half Marathon Pace (7:15 min/mi) and Goal Marathon Pace (7:38).  I was doing some killer workouts including adding GMP pace about halfway into my long runs.  Then I started to accumulate fatigue.  The beginning of the week, I could hit GHMP and GMP splits in my workouts, but later in the week I was stale.  I couldn't even complete the number of miles I set out to do in my long run.  So I did a major cut-back week and kept everything easy paced.  Then I seriously started to concentrate on limiting my speed mileage.  This all comes from Matt Fitzgerald's book 80/20 Running.  There's a chapter talking about watching out how you do your easy runs.  Most of us subconsciously creep into our tempo pace.  So I concentrated this past week to make sure that I didn't go any faster than ventilatory threshold, unless I was purposely going to run at GHMP or GMP.  Once I  caught myself creeping up into a pace that effected my breathing, I slowed down.  80% of my weekly miles was in this pace range.  The remaining 20% was either GHMP or GMP.  It worked because I felt great and included my long run earlier this morning which was a 22 miler.  Most miles in a training run this year, and 75.2 miles for the week which is a PR in weekly mileage.

This past Tuesday was a tempo run where 6 miles straight was actually a pace right in between GHMP and GMP (closer to GHMP).  Then today's run I implemented wave tempos where for 6 miles early on in my long run I alternated between GHMP and GMP.  I added 1 more GHMP and 1 more GMP miles towards the end for a fast finish.  So if you are counting, that is 14 miles out of 75.2 miles faster than easy pace.  That's 81.4/18.6 running this week.  Pretty close to 80/20.

Today's Tempo Wave workout was brought to my attention by Kristine of the She's A Gift blog.
This can be viewed on strava here.

Mile Split Pace
1 8:57
2 9:12
3 8:54
4 9:22
5 7:14
6 7:37
7 7:11
8 7:37
9 7:10
10 7:30
11 9:17
12 9:05
13 9:12
14 9:23
15 9:17
16 9:14
17 9:37
18 7:14
19 7:36
20 9:27
21 8:53
22 8:23