4.5 miles/7.24 kilometers, 9:30 mm pace, walked last .6 miles after a slight niggle on last section where I was running 8:15 mm pace, so the total run was a little less than four miles. 41 F, perfect running temp.
I ran the same route I ran on Sunday. After warming up for the first .4 mile, I started pushing it a bit, concentrating on my left foot's landing and not thinking about much else. I really hate having to think about form. It takes away the meditative aspect of running. I had also left my MP3 field recordings at home so I wouldn't get distracted from today's mission.
After two days of over-thinking and fretting over my next run, I had decided to set the pace alert at 10mm, as the 'tempo' on this tempo run. I wanted to see if I could shave off a few seconds from my average pace of 10:16 mm on Sunday's run. Well, I ended up slicing off 45 seconds per mile. On the next run, on Friday, assuming my knee doesn't make any noise later on today or tomorrow, I'll set the pace alert to 9:50 mm, then take another 10 seconds per mile off the next run, and so on.
I'm still trying to get an idea of how much I can push the knee while in active recovery. If it feels sorer than it did after Sunday's run, I may have to reduce distance or pace. If it feels about the same, I'll keep running this way for a bit, running the same route and trying to gradually get my pace down to around 8mm. At that point, or perhaps a little sooner, I'll add in my LSD and speed work again. These are the missing "extremes to specificity" components of my current routine. The idea here is to work on the distance and pace extremes on either side of the tempo run's distance and pace. On the LSD I'll run farther than my tempo run's 4.5-mile route, but at a slower pace. In my speedwork I'll do 440 and mile intervals at faster paces. Before my knee tweak I was building up to using my 7.4-mile lake route as the standard for my tempo run, but it seems best to choose an easier, more immediately accessible distance while I work on my target pace and continue to rehab the knee.
blah, blah, blah