Benchmark run 🏃‍♂️

On Sunday, I decided to start a three month half marathon training programme, to see if adding quality, reducing mileage, slowing down and generally mixing things up a bit improves my pace.

I’m following a Garmin programme and today was a five minute benchmark with 2x2 min mute warm up and cool down. The five minute effort was simply described as “run hard” so I ran that segment at 7:14 pace.

What’s interesting is that my heart rate peaked at 146 and averaged 130. But I did feel like I ran hard during the five minutes.

To me, that’s an indication that whilst my cardio performance is reasonable, I need to get the legs stronger and working much harder. So, I’m looking forward to some intervals, hills and maybe even some strength training.