After covering quite a bit of mileage on forest trails, I opted to go for a lunch break run on pavement for a change. Thankfully, there’s a bike path near work that is reasonably flat, far from vehicle traffic and at least in my experience doesn’t get much bike traffic but sees quite a large number of runners.

So off I went, covering the first kilometer in fast-for-me 4:48. I was able to follow-up with 4:52 and 4:54 splits on the next kilometers, but then I realized I’d gone too fast, and quite naturally reverted back to an average per km of between 5:00 and 5:30.

After exactly 5km I turned around and headed back the same way. I had to stop once waiting for a traffic light to go green, which slightly worsened my overall pace.

At the end, I covered exactly 10km in 52:09; which is the fastest I’ve run this distance since I started running with a GPS watch, and possibly the fastest I’ve ever done. According to Garmin Connect my course had 81m of elevation change, but looking at individual segments I’m not sure that number is very reliable. Apparently I burned 894 calories.

I feel like there’s still a lot of room for improvement. My muscles were slightly sore during the next day, which is surprising because during the past few days doing higher mileage with more elevation on trail runs hasn’t had that effect so far.