How fast are we really going on our runs?

If you take a look at the right-hand column, you'll notice that most of my miles are recorded at around 8:10/ pace. That's an average, of course, but all in all, if I run a thousand miles, it's taking me 8,167 minutes, give or take.

This sounds slow. After all, every race I run is a lot faster than that, except my first marathon one where an injury forced me to jog-walk the last 8 miles of another.

But the numbers don't tell everything. At the 1.5 mile mark of most of my runs, my watch says 13:45 or slower without fail. That's 9:10 pace. Coming home, the same stretch is run in around 11:40. I assure you, I'm not trying to speed up. It's just muscle warm-up kicking in. So the 8:10 pace is often 20 minutes of 9-minute pace and 40 minutes of 7:50-8:00 pace. Sometimes I go faster, but that is my LSD pace...Pfitz is OK with it; Glover and HH like it, but I find myself feeling guilty sometimes. Long runs are the same way....8:25 for 90 minutes, then 8:00 for 90. Maybe faster at the end--never at the start.

If I wanted my log to be cooler, I suppose I could exclude warm-up miles and say: 8 miles...2 w/up, then 7:50 pace...at least THAT'S closer to marathon pace and I can see it in cyber-ink.

But the bottom line is that if you run to warm-up and include those miles in your time, your "mid-stream" time is faster, and that's what matters, not speeding up mile one. In races, we're all warmed up, hyped and psyched. Mile 1 is often too fast. But in training, mile one feels like I'm trying out a new knee while still asleep. I'm not warm, not psyched and there's no hype. My legs are out there, but my mind's still in bed.