I am in month 3 of my comeback. I am almost 35 and started ten years after my last competitive race, post an ACL reconstruction, and with 50 lbs of extra weight (135 to 185).
I started in late August running 4 miles, 3 times a week and thought I was going to die at 8:30 pace. Within about two weeks of doing that I suddenly started feeling really good. I was running 730 pace and felt great. I then kicked it up to 6 miles 4 to 5 times a week and still felt good. I threw in a couple of 1min on, 1 min off workouts and loved the feeling of running "fast" again.
In the past month and a half since, I am down to 170 lbs. I am running 6 days and hitting 45 miles a week with a workout and building up my long run (currently at 11 miles, goal of 14).
The crazy thing is that if I don't pay attention, I bang out 6:15 mile in the middle of my easy or long runs without even feeling bad. I am actually having to force myself to slow down. 7:00 currently feels pedestrian. I have no idea what is going on here. I feel like my endurance is better than it ever was right now. I was a low 15s guy in my prime and don't know if I'll see that again but I feel like I could knock out a pretty good half with a few more months of training.
Today I ran 11 hilly miles and my first mile was 6:40 and I told myself to slow down and take it easy. My second mile was 6:38 and I felt like I was taking it easy. My last 3 miles were all under 6:30 and my HR didn't go over 155 the entire time.
I ran a 2 mile pace run last week to see how a sub 1800 pace would feel and ran 11:20 and felt absolutely fine. HR was under 160.
I am going to hold my mileage the same for at least a month in an attempt not to over so it but it is so hard to do.
I'm going to run a local Turkey Trot in a few weeks and my initial goal was sub 19. Since then I thought sub 18. Now I'm even thinking sub 17 is a possibility.
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