Sunday my running partner and I set out to do our weekly long run. In order to keep our heart rate down at our recovery pace we had to do it really slowly. The goal was to keep our bodies in the fat burning zone as much as possible in order to concerve our glycogen stores. This is supposed to make our hard runs later in teh week easier. It was really tough to go so slowly, especially seeing as the first 5.5 miles was pretty much all up hill until we turned around and did 5.5 back down.

Originally we were to leave at 9, but it was pouring and my partner wanted and eztra hour to finish her book. So at 10 when we did leave the rain had luckily tapered a bit. So our first hour was rainy, but not as bad as it ended up getting. The road we took was a hard packed dirt and gravel road up into Forest Park. The surface is rally rocky and somewhat hard on the feet (but not that bad once you can get used to it). It had rained so much earlier that night that there were tons of puddles. The runners coming down were covered in mud, looking like road warriors. We were soon to join them, however we were going so slowly we didn’t get too muddy.Some of the dogs on the road were a total mess, just caked with mud. It was pretty funny.

We managed really well with keeping the HR down. Our pace was really slow and even though we were going up for 5.5 and then down, it got consitently around 15 seconds slower each mile the entire run. The consitency of eth slowdown was really interesting to me.

Here is the online report the Garmin provided. When we got back to our starting spot, the run was showing up a quarter mile short. Looking at the report, you can see how off thebacktrack was. I have no idea why that would be. Makes you wonder how reliable GPS is.

Today, we are both really sore and mutually posponed our recovery run until this evening. I think we should still do it as our bodies will be craving some loosening by then.