Joy and Nomi took the plunge and signed up for their first 10km running race ever in May 2010 in Singapore at the Sundown Race event...Then they trained for a half marathon in the fall of 2010, Joy's in Canada and Nomi's in Malaysia...Then, they finished their second-ever half marathon in Singapore May 2011 at the Sundown Race event, but this time they ran together!

Then their sporting paths diverged: Nomi went on to run marathons while Joy learned how to ride a bike. This blog charts their progress from 2010 to 2012.

Read their blog to see what their sporting adventures look like or just look at the pictures of Canada's capital city and Malaysia's capital city. You can choose the "follow" option or subscribe via email to be notified of updates. (You can start reading/skimming their first entries from the summer of 2010 or just jump right in, reading from any point you like. The "Archives" will be your guide.)

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Tempo Run = Success!

Joy here...Well, yesterday was the dreaded tempo workout, and I had been fearing it all day.  Tempo runs are just really, really hard for me.  I mean, how do you just will yourself to run faster?  I don't know how people do it.  I just run and hope for the best, but with this 1/2 marathon training, I'm trying my hardest to be somewhat systematic.  So for Wednesday's run, we were up for 40 minutes of tempo running (i.e. hard, sustained running).  Since I do not look at my pace anymore for any of the speed workouts, I was simply working on heart rate.  I mean, there's no point in looking at my pace when I'm running as hard as I can, only to see that I'm not running fast enough.  I figure that if I keep my heart rate in the "hard" zone, then who cares about pace?  At least if my heart rate slows, then I can reasonably tell myself:  "self, it's time to work just a little bit harder."  But if I'm running as hard as I can and I look at the pace on my Garmin, it's really hard to move my legs any faster.  So the long and the short of it is that I think this heart rate strategy works, because even though it was hot and sunny, and even though I had a stitch in my side halfway through the tempo portion, and even though my shoulder was cramping, and even though all the sports drink I was downing from my camelbak was swishing uncomfortably in my stomach, and even though The Man was about 800 metres ahead of me, I was still able to pull off a fairly decent tempo run, thus earning myself today's rest day!  Yahoo!  We'll run easy again on Friday, and then Saturday will be a long run.  I'll try to practice my 21 km 1/2 marathon race strategy then...so stay tuned to find out how that goes.

For now, here are my run stats for Wednesday's tempo run:
Warm up:  Ran for a total of 33:28:38 for a distance of 5.87 km with an average pace of 5:42min/km and an average heart rate of 144beats/min.
Tempo:  Ran for a total of 40:00:12 for a distance of 7.93 km with an average pace of 5:03min/km and an average heart rate of 162beats/min.
Cool down:  Ran for a total of 8:05:32 for a distance of 1.35 km with an average pace of 6:00min/km and an average heart rate of 155beats/min.

All-in-all, I'm going to chalk this up as a success!

Over and out,
Joy

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