It's been possible to run over the Crusell-bridge (just before 3 km) for some time now, but yesterday I found a new walk/bike path under the lauttasaari bridge (just after 4 km), east along the motorway (4-5 km) connecting to the usual lap around the old cemetary and the hietsu-beach. Did 11 km at a pace just under 6 min/km.
This is certainly a very different way of running an 11k at an average pace of 6:28/km. All the training programs for half or full marathons recommend some form of intervals. Recommended distances range anywhere between 400 m to 1 mile (1600 m) with a few minutes of walking or easy jogging between repeats.
I'm not sure how/if the garmin 405cx can be set up for interval training, so I just did 1k of walking/jogging between my "fast" 1k's at ~5:00/km. Those slow resting km's took over 7 min, which is probably a little too much rest between repeats.
There are a lot of 4 hour-target-time marathon training programs out there. Finnish running-site "seppola" has these 1k at 5:00 pace intervals. I think Kuehls book talks about up to sixteen 400m repeats at 5:00 pace, while Galloway's program has 4-8x 1 mile repeats at 5:20 pace and Janne Holmen's program (see also here) has fewer long 3-4k repeats at 5:18/km or so.
There's a race in Forssa on Saturday(which I haven't signed up for...yet)
This pace is slightly slower than a 2 hour half-marathon, but that is partly because of the traffic-lights and other obstacles in the course. Kilometers 9, 10, and 11 felt pretty good - I wonder how much beyond 11k the wall lies?
In other news, lucid lynx is out, and my desktop machine is taking forever to download about 2600 Mb of upgrades.
11.66 km in 1 h 19 min, average pace 8.8 km/h.
The GPS trace above can be compared to a gmap-pedometer map below. I didn't run exactly according to plan, but the distance estimate is good to within ~5 % anyway.
