Interesting recovery run

I try to become less focussed on analysing performance (all the time & in all aspects of my life). One of the elements for that is to garther less data - this means I limit myself when to use my garmin (frontrunner 965). Normally I only wear the watch with my main training sessions, but for some reason I started today’s recovery run with my watch. Not wearing the watch allows you to run on what really feels good, rather than a specific pace or heartrate. But this run produced some interesting results aswell that I would like to share.

Breaking in new shoes:
My old Omni 22 wore out completely with not even that much kilometers on it, as I felt unresponsible to run with these soles even once - I settled for replacing them with the same pair

Old:

New:

While I would had loved to get a more durable pair I decided to not ruin my carbon shoes or trail shoes in the time that I would had needed to research a more suitable zone 1 - 2 shoe. Therefore as this pair was on sale I just reordered it and used an easy 5k to break them in.

The run:
My run today was mostly a recovery run, low heartbeat mostly zone 1 and during a few mini climbs some zone 2.

While this is my every day 0 effort run, it was very interesting to see that I stayed at zone 1 around the pace in which I ran my PR on the full marathon:

(At km 4.5:)

This means that both my hard efforts (Tuesday PR on 5k and 10k) had improved aswell as my easy pace on low heartrate.

Why am I so excited about this:

My marathon goal is getting way closer the prognoses right now are:

• safe: 3:08 - 3:12
• realistic: 3:02 - 3:06
• agressive (and risky): 2:58 - 3:02

With my PR around 3:17 this is a large jump to make. Honestly I need to hold myself back to give it a try next week and build a little further so that sub 3 is within the realistic scenario!

Happy running!