I walked out the door of our condo at Copper Mountain this morning and was greeted by the amazing views, I have seen for the past week.  A higher intensity workout was on my schedule, for the first time since coming to this high altitude ski resort.

I was planning to run for just under an hour, but I would be including thirty minutes of running at tempo effort.  Based on the runs I had already done at the resort, I knew my pace on this tempo run would be slower than what I would normally expect.  What I didn’t expect was how hard it would be to control my pace and effort.

I chose to do my run on the bike path that I ran on a few days ago.  I ran a mile to get to the bike path, which was the perfect warm up. Once there, I chose to start my tempo effort, by running slightly downhill.  My thinking was that this would allow me to pick up the pace without getting too winded in the process.

Boy was I wrong about that.  After picking up speed for a few minutes, I was already gasping for air.  My breathing was really hard and I was not running that fast.  It was a complete surprise and I needed to re-set.  To re-set, I chose to walk a little and get my breathing under control again.  Once I was breathing normally, I started the tempo effort again, but ran much slower this time.

Fortunately, I found a pace where I was working hard, but not going anaerobic.  After a while however, I needed to turn around and run back up hill.  On doing this, I dropped my pace significantly. I stayed under control with my breathing for the first part of the uphill, and then tried to up the pace a little.  That was a mistake; I went anaerobic again almost immediately.  The difference in effort, from being under control to being out of breath, was surprisingly small.

As I ran back towards the Copper Mountain resort, I played around with effort, to try and better judge where I went anaerobic.  It was fun to try and judge this and it was a great day of learning.  Hopefully, this experience will help me on my run tomorrow.