Sunday I went out for a 6-mile run in 1:05:44, which is currently at the long end of the distances I've been doing. The last time I was running longer was back in the spring when I was preparing for two half-marathons; since then I've been doing runs of 3-5 miles generally. One of the things I've been trying much of the year (since the end of the second half-marathon, in fact) is to use a more structured run/walk approach. I'm not currently able to run more than about 3 continuous miles without starting to huff and puff, so adding in short walk breaks lets my heart-rate settle down a little.
I've gotten to the point where I'm running for 6 minutes and walking for 1, repeating that until I'm done. Previously I'd been doing these more as intervals, where I'd run pretty fast for the 6 minutes, and then spend the minute gasping for breath, slowing down a little on each subsequent interval. That's ok for a limited distance, but since I'm starting to train for a full marathon I need an approach that will match the distance. At my level the question is not how fast I can run a given mile, but how many miles I can run at a consistent pace before I start to falter.
All of this is a long wind-up to the fact that I was successful at hitting a very consistent pace during my run yesterday by deliberately doing the run portion at at slower pace than I was capable of. The result is that I ended up with 9 almost identical intervals, where I was running at a 10:20-10:30/mile pace during each of them. Coupled with the walks the overall pace was 10:57/mile. That's a little slow compared to what I've run 6 miles in recently, but not a lot, and at the end I could have run several more miles at the same pace without too much difficulty. So, I'm counting this as a success, and hopefully as I start to increase the distance between now and March this will continue to work well for me.
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