Accidental Tempo

Normally, I'm the girl who uses every excuse in the book to avoid speed work. While, I know that workouts are necessary to improve running prowess, it's hard to motivate myself to get out the door and hit those paces.

Whenever I see a number lower than 9 for the pace, I start panicking. Hold a 8:30/mile pace for tempo? Ahhh panic time!

Today, I just set out with the bf, Stef, to get in some nice five miles. Since we were both rushed for time, we planned to pick it up a bit more than our usual together runs and shoot for 10:00/mile pace.

I'm literally shooting, sort of like how we were shooting for 10:00/mile pace. And literally shooting as in with my hands. 

However, once I got going, it felt so nice to pick up the pace a bit. After last night's 12:something /mile pace, this run was exactly what I needed mentally.

In fact, I felt so great that I kept on picking up the pace and eventually left Stef behind. (Oops?) By the end third mile, I realized that I was close to hitting my tempo pace, 8:30/mile. I made an executive decision to turn the run into a tempo workout and picked it up to hit my actual tempo pace.

Non-icy, flat side walk is the best. 

I then steadily negative split (What? Who killed and replaced me?) the whole run. It would be dishonest of me to not tell you about the easiness of the course. Since the way to my half way point was on a slight incline or a flat, the way back was on a slight decline or a flat, so it wasn't too hard to be faster than my tempo pace.

Ignore the last interval. I walked to cool down. But negative splitted every  mile! 

My overall pace for the run was 8:52/mile. This was the exact run that I needed to show me that I can run faster during the weekdays and slow down my long run.

Don't you love it when a run exceeds expectations? How do you motivate yourself to do workout runs?