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Fast until it wasn't

January 16, 2019 (Night)

Exercise Type: Run

Comments:
I decided after yesterday's sore and sluggish run to try to keep it flat tonight. I almost succeeded. I also decided to try to run fast. That was more successful until it wasn't. Let me explain...

I started out on the state highway in front of my house, which I've recently learned is nicknamed the "Tranzit" because it's the main bypass road around downtown Sarajevo. It was late afternoon and so there was a sporatic stream of cars, and with the sidewalks still mostly covered in snow, I ran on the road facing traffic, periodically stepping into the snow when a vehicle approached. In spite of these interruptions, I managed to maintain what felt to me like a solid tempo pace. This was the first time I'd tried to do a tempo since my run w/ Noah in December, and it's felt good to once again be testing my abilities. I cruised downhill along the Tranzit for 2 miles, but eventually I grew tired for dealing with cars and so opted to turn onto a backroad call Novopazarska (meaning "New Market") that parallelled the main highway but wound through little village-like neighborhoods along the ridge. Novopazarska had a thin layer of snow in some places, but for the most part was reasonably clear. The problem is that while the Tranzit had been a slight by steady downhill, Novopazarska had considerable ups and downs, as it wound from one hilltop to the next. Nothing like my runs in the mountains for the past two weeks mind you but still enough to really knock the momentum out of my stride. By the time I got to the end a large farm-and-village covered hill called Mojmilo Brdo, I was actually at a higher elevation than I'd started. I did manage to keep up an honest effort the whole way, never slagging from a tempo pace, and my breathing was heavy for the most of the run. Still, when I looked at Strava, I was disappointed to find I'd only been averaging a 7:15. I thought I'd been a good deal faster. The first two downhill miles on a smooth road had been 6:43s which I was pretty happy about, but the last two had been a minute slower. I guess given the rolling terrain I shouldn't be too bummed, but I thought I was quicker. In any case, after that I descended a very steep hill into the Aerodromska (Airportish? Airport-like?) neighborhood, ran out to the airport itself, and then curved back into the city. I had told myself 6 miles of tempo was enough, but I wasn't preparing to slow down quite as much as I did for the next 6.5 very flat miles. What happened is that I got caught up thinking about experiments and what I could do for my thesis and what s data I should try to get access to. Turns out when I'm brainstorming really creatively I don't do so fast. This happened to me a few times in college when I was thinking really hard about my math dissertation while on runs in the woods and would find myself slowing to a walk and then stopping to draw geometric figures in the dirt. I think better when I'm pacing (even when I'm working on a paper I'll get up and pace around my rooms sometimes) but I think that running, or at least running fsat, or remembering to run fast, saps to much mental effort. I bet if I were in a group on a run though I could zone out and be creative and my pace would continue to match that of the people around me. I guess the moral is that I kinda slow down if I'm not paying attention. Anyway, after 2 hours I felt like my left glute was starting to act up and I was still a ways from home so I called it a day (at 12.5 miles) and took a tram the rest of the way home.

WOW! Get this! I just discovered that Strava offers something called GAP - Grade Adjusted Pace - which calculates what you equivalent pace would have been on flat ground. It doesn't take into account how bumpy, rough, or snowly the actual surface it, but it's a good start.

From their website: "The adjustment generally becomes larger as the grade steepens, although research has shown that the downhill adjustment peaks around -20%, after which it becomes slightly less extreme. Grade Adjusted Pace does not account for terrain differences or the technical difficulty of running downhill. The calculation of Grade Adjusted Pace is inspired by work done by C.T.M Davies and Alberto Minetti studying the effects of grade on the energy cost of running."

That's good enough for me!
In my first 5 miles my actual pace varied from 6:43 to 7:53 but in GAP it varied from 6:14 to 6:59, plus some of the overall uphill miles were as fast as the net downhills. That feels like a much more reasonable way to measure "Sarajevo Pace" than looking at what my actual minutes per mile were.