Back on schedule

The small break that I took from training after Los Angeles is officially over. This week saw me return to my training plan with a total of 84km (the plan asked for 80). I'm pretty confident I can maintain the plan again until race weekend at the end of May. I hope I can get back in the groove of blogging at least a few times a week instead of rushing to lump it all in at the end of the week.

Monday was a 16km tempo at a pretty even 5:01 pace
On Wednesday's interval, I tried to copy Marlene's 2km intervals with 500m rest. While I wasn't able to get progressively faster like she did, I still got satisfactory intervals of 4:26, 4:34 and 4:30, 4:39 and 4:22, 4:35. I don't know how I managed to keep a 4:30 pace for an entire 10km back in January. I wonder if I could do it again at a race... I just love seeing so much green on RunSaturday.com's heatmaps:
Friday was supposed to be a 20km tempo, so I ran to work. Not quite the tempo I was looking for at 5:13 but it just didn't feel right to push faster.

The plan on Sunday was a long slow run of 32km. Some friends were doing a 10km run downtown that I was told would be quite slow so I felt it was safe to join them for the last portion of my own run after running to downtown. Add in some delays because it's early Sunday morning and a last minute change of venue and my quite comfortable 6:00 pace was no longer reasonable if I was to meet them at the agreed time. I was a bit unfamiliar with the route I was taking so I even threw the afterburners on for a bit and managed a 5m/km pace for a few kms to ensure I would make it in time. I got there about 2 minutes before we set out at a leisurely 7m/km pace. Two of us managed to sprint for the last 2 kms to put in a bit of an extra effort. I ended up with 2 more bonus kms in the bank at an overall pace of 5:41.