Went for a run early this evening.  It was a great way to put the work week behind me, and head into the weekend.

I haven’t run for seven days, to make sure my foot is fully pain free. My run tonight was not only pain free, but also very relaxing.  That was the way it was supposed to be, because it was a scheduled ‘recovery pace’ run.  This ‘pace’ is really not a ‘pace’ at all, but a feeling.  This run was all about running by feel at a very low effort.

It is very important to run almost all runs by feel, and let the pace be the pace.  Some days you ‘have it’ and on others, you don’t feel good at all.  Most of the time you feel just alright.  In each of these cases, if  you run by feel, you will get good benefit from the workout.  It just so happens that on the days when you ‘have it’, the pace is faster than average, and on those poor days, the pace is slower.

The worst thing you can do is push yourself to hit a certain pace, especially on those days when you aren’t feeling that great.  It requires too much effort and you end up, working much harder than you should be, on an easy day.

On my run tonight, I would say that I felt ‘average’ and when I finished my run, my pace was pretty much as I expected for a typical recovery pace run. 

Also on my run tonight, I ran alone and I ran in a place with almost no people, the local high school.  My wife (who took the photo above) and daughter were there, plus one or two others.  We decided against the local park, because we had heard there were too many runners for safe ‘social distancing’.  

I have another short run tomorrow. I’ll be back at the high school again; that way I know I can run while safely keeping my distance…  be safe everyone.