Three mile Friday.

Today was the last of my sweet delicious three mile runs. Next week I go up to 4 miles on the short run ( which I hope will still be sweet). I concentrated on pacing today, my goal being to keep todays pace faster yesterday's long run. It ended up being about 40 seconds per mile faster. I did sprint the last quarter mile as I usually do towards home. I love that last downhill run before I hit the house. It's a huge sidewalk that slopes nicely down to the end of my street and then I just have a slight turn and I'm home free. The flip side is every run starts with a hill, which is a challenging way to warm up. Now, I'm absolutely not doing speedwork because I want to avoid injury as much as possible. But I have found that if I really pay attention to my pacing I can run very comfortably ( and by comfortably I mean not out of breath, not flinging myself downhill at out of control breakneck speeds, and not cheating on a treadmill by cranking up the tempo as fast as I can take it without being thrown off) at a faster pace than I used to run. I give the long slow runs credit for that increase in speed, as well as just paying attention to what each pace feels like. Next week I start back to work on Monday, so I'll be getting up before dawn for my new longer morning runs. At least the weather will be cooler at that time in the morning.