Steady Pace Increase
I thought I’d go for a slightly longer run today. It was a quiet day with a light breeze and cloudy skies so I decided to stay close to home and just do laps of the dunes.
The lap around the top portion of the dunes is exactly 1 mile long. It goes up over a soft sandy dune and onto a gravel path through the slacks. It then climbs up over another dune with a few steps and more soft sand before descending through loose sand to the pebbles. I then gingerly make my way over the pebbles to the relatively hard sand of the beach and head north towards the point. The plover-nest fencing then forces me up over another very soft dune and then down onto the muddy sands of the estuary before I finish off the loop by the visitor centre.
I planned to do it about 6 times so that with a 12 minute or so run to get there and the same to get back I’d end up running for about 90 minutes. It’s never going to be fast with so much soft sand, steep dunes and pebbles to cross, but I was also taking it easy as it was going to be a fairly long run. The first lap took me 10:14. The next one was a little quicker at 10:09, so I decided to see if I could make each one just a tiny bit faster. I managed it for all 6 laps with a very steady progression. Excluding the run there and back my mile splits were:
- 10:14
- 10:09
- 9:55
- 9:46
- 9:36
- 9:23
It made a nice little pace analysis chart that shows the steady increase in pace mile on mile. I do like a nice neat chart!
It did mean that my entire run was a little less than 90 minutes, but that was OK by me. Of course, it would be better if the blue bars were a little higher and if there were more of them but it’s probably faster and further than many people did today.
