Canal Long Run

My favoured venue for long runs is the Leeds-Liverpool Canal towpath. For today's run I started at Dowley Gap, near Cottingley & ran to Silsden & back, a total of 24.8km. I think that this kind of distance is about right for my half marathon build up, although I did a 28km one before the Brussels Half. I was also a bit wary about not wanting to do an excessively long run too close to the Ribble Valley 10k a week on Sunday.

Conditions were very good again today, light wind (against on the way out, behind coming back), not too cold, dry, although with a muddy section of path just before Silsden, about 2km each way. My goal for long runs is to go at a steady pace on the way out, then run faster on the way back, I also had the data from last time I ran this route (in mid September), so I wanted to run a bit quicker than that.

I was comfortably quicker to Silsden than my previous run, by one & a half minutes. I paid the price for this on the way back, as it was hard work to increase the pace & run faster than my target. However, I persevered and managed to average 4:31 min/km on the return, which was just a bit quicker than I did in September, albeit after a much faster 1st half (not bad considering it's winter, I was wearing several layers of clothing & a had long section of mud).

At the end I felt quite tired, I probably put in more effort than I should have done for a long run. The training theories seem to be that you should run long runs at a slow/steady pace, rather than a quick/steady pace. It will be interesting how my recovery is over the next few days.