Breakfast time!
Happy Sunday. What have you got planned? The Husband is mowing the lawn, I tidied the house, and then we’re going to lunch with friends. I hope to squeeze in a swim at some point. We’ll see. 
Cereal + yogurt:
We bought some puffed millet to make Anne P’s peanut butter bars; she uses brown rice cereal but I like to use millet in the recipe. We had some leftovers so I combined it with Greek yogurt for a very easy breakfast.
We always eat breakfast out on the patio on the weekends… it’s starting to get too hot for that, even with a cold meal!
Tempo Runs and Fast Paces
A lot of training plans talk about doing ‘tempo runs.’ I confess, for a really long time, I was terribly, terribly confused by the concept of a tempo run. How does it work? How fast should I run and for how long? Do I have to wear a GPS watch to do a tempo run?
There’s a great article on Runners’ World about How to Run a Tempo Workout. Jenny Hadfield describes a tempo run like an Oreo cookie:
Simply put, a tempo run is like an Oreo cookie—with the cookie part the warmup and cool-down (easy-paced running) and the filling (good stuff) running at a comfortably hard effort for a sustained period of time.
Now, I can definitely understand a good cookie analogy. I also like how Jenny creates a plan for determining tempo run pace without the need of a watch – it’s also a technique that varies according to conditions like weather and how you’re feeling that given day. I like flexibility!
As a side note, I’m very curious to see what happens with my pace when I get back into running post-baby. When I got pregnant, I wasn’t particularly fast or slow – I was a middle-of-the-pack runner who often used a walk/run method in races. My buddy Jen at Runners Trials (who is truly fast, no matter how you slice and define fast) has a cute post about Why Motherhood Makes You a Faster Runner. Fingers crossed it applies to me, too. 
Fast and slow are such relative terms, both to the runner and for that point in their life. So is what constitutes a ‘long run.’ Right now, considering that I haven’t run in nearly 24 weeks, a fast run would be anything in which I am not walking, and a long run would be to the end of the block! No. Seriously. But otherwise, for me, a fast run is something under a 10:00 mile. And a long run is anything that takes me over 45 minutes to do.
What do you consider a fast run? Or a long run?
That is exactly how I define “fast” and “long”. We would make great running buddies!