This week I decided to push myself a bit more - I did a 30 / 30 / 50 minute runs and the 30 minute runs were at 5 mph (upgrade over my usual 4.5 mph). The 50 minute run was at 4.5 mph as it's meant to be longer and I didn't want to unnecessarily push myself too hard.

The middle run was kind-of hard because I had a rough night that night. As per coach: that's exactly what poor sleep does — HR becomes jumpy and exaggerated. Makes the run more difficult.

The interesting finding is that coach was pretty adamant on not increasing the pace, but now that I did that and ran the two runs at 5 mph, it seems to be more open to the idea.

Plan for next week:

• 1x 55 minute
• 2x 30 minutes, you may run ~4.8–5.0 mph if it still feels easy, but no pushing.

And I got some encouragement:

At this point, the half marathon is physiologically very realistic.

The next big threshold will be when your long run reaches ~75 minutes.

Let's go!