The Winds of Change have been blowing for the past few days and today, they drove me inside on the treadmill again.

32*F with a slight breeze in excess of 30 mph most of the day meant the feels like temperature was actually down in the teens. Not what I really wanted to deal with this morning. So yeah, I headed for another run on the treadmill. However, I wasn’t all that keen on doing 9-10 miles at a 9:00 minute or a bit faster pace on the ‘mill.

I really prefer to use the treadmill for “faster” paced stuff, I decided to trade Sunday’s speed workout to today and do the long run on Sunday, when the meteorologists are predicting a pretty nice day. So I planned on doing a 12 x .25 @ 8.6 mph (just under 7:00 minute pace supposedly).

What did I end up doing?

• 1.0 mile @ 6.5 mph for a warm-up
• 11 x .25 @ 8.6 mph – After the first one I felt really strong and focused on my arm swing and how I was feeling running at this pace. I wanted to “know” this pace, especially the last four repeats when I was getting tired.
• 1 x .50 @ 8.6 mph – I purposely started the fast repeats right at the 1.0 mile mark, so that I would have a choice of ending the workout at 6.75 and cruising to 7.0 miles or finishing hard. You can guess what I did – yep finished hard. Surprisingly I was feeling pretty good right to the end.
• with recoveries @ 6.2 mph

It was a really good workout, but at the same time, it is a workout that I KNOW that I can do now. I have finished this workout twice before, so even changing up the workout at the last minute, I was confident of my ability to finish it. Which is something that I never had in the past and always listened to that little voice inside of my head that said this is getting too hard, it is time to stop after 7-8 repeats. Hopefully, some of this translates over to an actual race.

One thing that does make a difference is listening to music during the run, I do tend to change my cadence based on the tempo of the song at the time. I still haven’t really thought about using music during a race, I have never done that, but I might on a fun run this spring. We will see.

We did loose power this afternoon, but we were lucky and it was only for a couple of hours and I didn’t even have to bother with lighting off the wood stove. It was an excellent time for that wonderful thing called a nap. Bennie and I got comfortable in the new recliner, put a blanket over us and did our best impression of a siesta time.

Other than the run and lack of power, it was just another day, where things just went along quietly.