Last 6 miles, Best 6 miles

Today was the last of my 6-mile morning walks. Next week I'll be cutting back to 3-miles as part of my taper schedule. Before going out I looked up my best time, 11:20 pace on January 30, and decided to try and better it.

Mile 1 - 10:41
Mile 2 - 10:54
Mile 3 - 10:53
Mile 4 - 11:16
Mile 5 - 11:20
Mile 6 - 11:02
Average Pace - 11:01 * new PR
Total Workout - 1:06:07

It would have been nice to break 11 minutes per mile, I was well under that on the first three miles--another personal record for me. I slowed down on miles 4-5 but picked it up a bit on the last mile.

This morning it was warm enough to leave the sweat shirt behind. One problem was that the heart rate monitor was not registering consistently accurate readings until around mile 4 when I started building up a little bit of sweat. Maybe some conductivity cream will work better than tap water on the heart rate monitor transmitter, I should try it out.

When I could get a reading my heart rate was averaging between 165-170 bpm. It is interesting to see how heat, level of hydration, going uphill or downhill, how late I stayed up the night before and other factors affects heart rate. When I did the 10 mile race my heartbeat stayed above 170 bpm yet my pace was slower than today.

I don't bring along water on these morning walks. What I do is prepare a quart of Hydralyte, drink half of it before going out and the other half while stretching after the walk. This seems to work fine for distances up to 6 miles. For the marathon I plan to drink every 2 miles and take a packet of GU every 4 miles, that seems to be easy enough to remember and I won't have to carry any bottles--that's a change of what I planned to do a couple of weeks ago.