Fat Tire Loop PR

A series of fortunate events....

I have been on a roll the last couple of days, so I figured I would attempt another PR run this morning.  I decided on the Fat Tire Loop that I do fairly regularly with Derek and Christie.

The first fortunate thing that happened was the temperature was reasonable so I left the PI wind jacket in the car.  I got seriously hot later and it would have been a pain.

The second fortunate thing was seeing Trina Lund running by just as I was starting.  We chatted as I was getting going before her group went up the Military Connector trail and I continued up Three Bears trail.  This served as a proper warm-up without spiking my heart rate which I tend to do.

The third fortunate thing was the 20 MPH headwind all the way up the climb to Fat Tire and another half mile down the trail.  The headwind forced me to remain conservative so I wouldn't get my heart rate out of control from pushing too hard.  Unfortunately, mother nature wasn't as kind on the downhill.  I never felt like the wind was at my back when I started down.

After I checked the Garmin stuff I was surprised at the pace over the last few miles.  I was trying to remain loose and not push too hard.  The pace was 6:38, 6:40, and 6:07.  If I had kept going another 0.30 it would have been faster than my fastest ever 5K training run.

The fastest Garmin track I have of this route was 1:17 but I seem to remember doing it once by myself without the Garmin in 1:07 something.  I finished this one in 1:05:21 and believe it or not I never looked at the miles, time, or pace once.  I always have my watch set to show current HR and lap HR.  For some reason I run better when I am not TRYING to press because of what the watch is saying at the time.

I ended with an average HR of 150 which was great considering the pace and almost 1300 feet of elevation gain.  More impressive to me though, was the Max HR of 173 over the course of the whole run.  I usually suffer when I let the Max spike off the chart and then have a hard time recovering from it.

After I finished I rounded it out to a half marathon by running 5 more easy miles on Shane's Loop.  The half ended up 1:57:52 and 1900 feet of gain.

I may take tomorrow as a rest day!