Afternoon Maintainance run

I will start the post with saying that I am very surprised with my pace today. For the last few Mondays I have been running on fresh legs, while I keep the effort easy, it can become a race with easy runs, so today to avoid that, I decided to just run easy, but getting advantage of my fresh legs but without looking at the watch, I always look at it in the first lap, but today decided to desconnect and just ran easy but getting advantage of the freshness! I pressed the split button in my 8th lap and then did a 9 th lap as an habit on Mondays.

I ran at 4:45 p.m. in the Blasco park, the weather was pretty good but a bit windy. It was around 17 Celsius. As I said, the plan was to run 9 laps, with 6 strides between 6th and 8th lap and the last lap for "cool down".

Felt pretty good and easy, I though that I was running slower than other Mondays, that its ok, you have to run hard on your hard workouts not your easy runs, so I just relax and went with the flow. When I finished the run and saw the finishing time of 46:49 for 8.1k or so I could not believe it, I just had to check it several times. Also in the 8th lap I had 41:43, so the last lap was 5:06 and I barely moved the legs. I destroyed my time from last week, and last week I thought that I would not run much faster at an easy effort. Although its just an easy run, I am very surprised with the way that I am feeling lately.
The training is paying off, or maybe my easy runs are catching up with my workout paces, My workouts (Intervals and tempos) are much faster than my easy paces in comparition, I mean, given my easy runs, people would not believe that I could run intervals in less than 4:25 per km and 400m in 1:30s. Anyway, I ll just do these runs without looking at the watch like today and just running easy by feel, that way I dont start competing to beat last week`s time. Other easy days are not that important since I am just recovering from workouts and the pace is quite slow!