I had to laugh today when I looked at the distance of my hellish tempo run, 6.66 miles! Running with the Devil should have been on my Ipod today. It was actually not too bad of a run, not nearly as hellish as it sounds. I tried to keep a relatively consistent pace on the three mile tempo portion. In the past I have gone out fast and then faded. Today I dialed the pace back a little and ran the first mile at 8:11, still pretty fast for me. My second mile was a bit faster at 8:03. I was still starting to fade on the third mile, but I picked it up for the last half and really cranked it out for the final quarter mile and came in at 8:15. So overall I was pretty happy with the consistency of today’ tempo run.

Even though I held back on going really fast, my HR was still pretty high averaging 163 for the whole run with a max of 187. My avg HRs on the splits was 162, 175 & 177. Still probably higher than I want it for these runs, but actually thinking about how I felt it wasn’t too bad. There were a couple of times when I knew I was going to hard and the 187s of my final mile show that (plus I was pushing it in hopes of combating a slow start to that mile.)

I have been trying to wrap my head around calories burned on my workouts. Last night I ran a slow six miles with an average pace of 10:46 and avg HR of 136. Today’s tempo run, a much harder run in terms of effort had an average HR of 163 and avg pace of 9:17 (which is not totally accurate representation as it was three miles of fast and 3.66 of warm up and cool down. The easy run from last night burned 843 cals and the tempo run (despite being .66 mi further) only added a little over 100 cals. It really seems like I should have burned more calories if it is so tied to HR as they say it is. There is an increase, but very little. 140.5 per mile on the slow run and 144 per mile on the fast. Hardly worth it if burning calories was the goal.