I stumbled up the blog No Meat Athlete today, and was really taken by its tagline: Runs on Plants. So I copied! Matt, I hope you take it as a sign of respeck' yo. And a short google revealed that the only other blog called Runs On Plants belongs to the also-vegan Lauren over here,  which is pretty darn good if you've ever googled "Run X Run" (as this blog also used to go by). Hello!

I've also linked to a couple of other vegan and veg running blogs. It's not that I particularly want to discuss my veganism here - I do that over here! You can listen to me twice as much!  - but I guess to those blogs are more relevant to me and it's a bit of a community thing too. There's also some blogs that I've just enjoyed lurking at. Hello to you too!

And to the run...

Having done what I'm now terming 'my long run' on Sunday (wooha 40 minutes!) I went for my tempo (god I'm so up with the lingo) this morning. 

I chose 20 minutes, mostly because most training programs assume that you actually have a slow and a medium and fast past pace to run at. When your slow pace is 7km/hr and your fast pace is 8km/hr, it's a little squishy so I'm trying to differentiate with time. 

Over my last few runs my base pace has been 7.2 km/hr, or 7km/hr when I'm tiring. 8km/hr has been more than I could sustain for a couple of minutes, and 9km/hr fairly side-bursting. 

And so today, my lowest speed was 7.5km/hr. Nice work for a tempo! I ran 5 minutes at 7.5km/hr, then ten minutes at 8km/hr, two at 7.5km/hr, two at 8km/hr and then a minute at 9km/hr to round it off. I felt great in the ten minute 8km/hr section - like I was running! I maybe could have lasted for fifteen minutes at 8, but wasn't prepared to push too much. 

My hip raised its hand to remind me it was there, but it didn't chuck a tantie. I did ten minutes on the weird ski-like cross-trainer, and then ran out a final kilometre at 8km/hr (so 7:30/km) to round it off. It might sound slow - and it is. But it felt strong to me.