Tempo run round Furzton Lake

Route: Furzton Lake circuit

Distance: 8 miles

Terrain: path

Ascent: ~100'

Total time: 01:01:14

Garmin splits: 8:43 (warm-up), 6:58, 7:01, 7:00, 6:57, 7:00, 6:55, 10:34 (cool-down)

SportTracks splits: 8:46 (warm-up), 6:59, 7:05, 7:03, 6:58, 7:02, 7:16, 10:02 (cool-down)

Another freezing fog bound night last night for my weekly tempo run round Furzton Lake. It didn't look like it was windy but with the temperature below zero (the lake was freezing over in the shallows) the slightest breeze was bone chilling. Good motivation for running fast.

I felt much stronger running this week than last and my splits were faster and more consistent as a result. I think a huge part of running faster is training your body to a particular tempo or cadence and keeping good form. I did find my pace dropped when I began to not concentrate on form so I've not quite drilled it into the nerve pathways yet.

I can see me keeping up a sub 7 min/mile pace for the MK half marathon in ~ 10 days time but it might be a challenge for me to get sub 1:30 overall. If so I'll keep up the tempo runs and crack it by the end of the year.

I have started using SportTracks to store and analyse the data from my Garmin after Marco tipped me off about it. He's been a great help in answering questions - thanks! Good excuse for him (and me) to email about non-work related issues. Being able to link directly to Google Earth is great and now I can see how to see your splits the software is definitely better than Garmin's training centre. It also measures ascent more accurately - Garmin was off by over 100%.

However the splits calculated by SportTracks and Garmin don't tally even though they are both using the same data downloaded from the 205. Not sure why this is or which one is more accurate so I've included both sets of splits above.

I am tending to think that Garmin is more reliable, not just because it makes me look faster but because I ran the last fast split at sub 7 min/mile pace (checking my 205 as I ran) so I don't really understand why SportTracks calculated well over 7 min/mile. I'll investigate and see if I come up with anything.