This Saturday I’ll participate in a charity run where you find people sponsoring you and they will donate based on how many laps (400m) you manage to run in 2 hours.
My longest run so far was a 10 km run with a pace of 5:30 (very exhausted afterwards) and once with a pace of 6:15 (felt like I could have gone another 30 mins, however my HR steadily climbed from around 160 to 180 at the end).
My two questions to you experienced runners:
- What would a good strategy for running the longest distance possible in 2 hours?
- Is my HR an issue? It didn’t seem to really stabilize and was around 180 for the last 10 mins. Will it plateau if I run more than the 60 mins or will I run out of energy before?
PS: I know running that long without proper training might be stupid but I’m determined to make my sponsors pay.
Having just finished my first half-marathon, my advice is to start very slow, slower than your 10k times, and try to keep that pace. If I had to do it over, I would try to stick to 75% of my max heart rate. I made the classic error of letting myself get carried away with the crowd and ended up walking much of the second half, and ultimately my time was what it would have been if I had kept that limit on my heart rate, and I felt much more exhausted than I would have been.