20/November - my "first workout"

I am still a little beaten up from last Sunday's long run. Honestly speaking, 38km "fast" are too much of a workout.I would say that either 35k at easy pace or 30/31k with MP sections are already an excellent workout.
I read that many Japanese or Kenyan runners have 1 or 2 super-long runs in their training cycle (i read of about 38/40km), but their recovery capability is much superior to ours...
So in the future I will stick to maximum 34/35k o even less if there are faster sections within.
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This morning the temperature in Dongguan was a gorgeous 12C (the lowest this year) because of the northern monsoon so I did my first serious tempo run of the year...
On the outer ring of Qx town I clocked around 12.3-12.7 km in 46'00", with an average HR right on my MP effort (168bpm).
The Google Earth gave me 12.4km, but my Polar was for 12.7k . So the pace was around 3'38"-3'43"/km, which is not bad considering that is my serious workout in 6 weeks.
It was really a good effort. I felt some tightness in the right hip, but is going much better than 1 week ago. It was good that I was in control of the pace and effort and I manages the small undulations without seeing the HR skyrocketing.

The negative point is that I lost a lot of flexibility in my feet with all these achilles problem and I was really "slamming the feet" heavily... need to work on the stride..

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Lastly, I got to know that next Sunday's race might see also a Kenyan runner at the start. There are some 2nd tier Kenyans based in Malaysia who take part in races around Asia.
The Half Marathon has a first prize award of a 100USD shoes voucher, so not real money...
Said that, that will remove a lot of passion in the battle for the 1st place and a lot of pressure also on my performance. I was keen to race hard for the victory, but 2nd or 5th makes little change, so I might decide to go out at Marathon pace as training session.