Five mile easy run

Workout was 45 minutes at 70%. That sounds right about marathon pace to me. I did a five mile loop from home at 6:45 a.m. - Love to get the runs in early whenever possible. Ran with a friend which made it even more pleasurable - the five miles was over before we even knew it.


Finished the run in 43:15 which equates to 8:39 pace avg HR 141. Considering how comfortable this felt and the fact that I am still tapering (last night was a pretty hard workout, short but hard) I am rethinking where I might line up at the marathon. If there was a 3:55 pace group, that is where I would be, but the next pace group after four hours is 3:50. That equates to about 8:45 pace. This is where I think I am going to line up.


I love the Garmin. I can't believe I did not get one of these a long time ago. Mr. gadget, of course, had to one up me on this. He got the 310. I noticed one other difference other than it being waterproof, the battery lasting longer and it costing $175 more - it's a little smaller as well. Still bigger than the typical HR monitor though so I am still not sure I would swim with it.

The only thing that bugged me about the Garmin is that the HR display was so damn small - I could not see my HR at all while running and had to rely on monitoring my breathing and keeping a conversation going to determine my effort. I have since learned how to customize the screens so I can see what I need to. I have the running screen customized to show me time, heart rate, average pace and distance. There is a lap screen on there as well and although I am going to try to keep my splits, I will not use this screen during the marathon. There is one other screen I can toggle to and I could not think of any other real useful combinations so I set it up the same as the running screen, but instead of average pace I have the time of day showing. I figure it is best to show up at the start line on time.