Progress is Motivating!

Easy treadmill recovery run yesterday...thought I'd start out at 12:00 min miles and slowly increase the pace until I got to 75% of my heart rate, just to see how things are progressing.

12 min/mi = about 60%...wow, that's kind of new. Cool.
11 min/mi = about 65%. Even better. Held that for about 5 minutes and it settled back below 65%...nice.
10 min/mi = 70%...held this to the end of mile 1...still no increase, holding steady at 70%. Huh.

Still feeling really good, fairly easy, pretty strong...

9:30 min/mi = ~74%... let's see how long I can stay right here... only slightly uncomfortable.

Well that, my friends, was the first sub 10 min mile I've run in a long time. I held it into mile 3 for a little bit but my HR started to creep up...75%, 76%...so I backed off a little bit and finished out 3 miles at about 10 min/mi... nice. Felt awesome.

And this morning in the pool, my 100 yd. free repeats were coming in consistently at about 1:32... at a relatively easy effort. It's all about not fighting the water.

There's nothing quite as motivating as progress...

Train hard!!