Pacing myself

So when I wrote about my run at the Unite Half Marathon I left out one important bit of info, my time. I ran the race in 2:46:31 (2:47:26 gun time) - a personal Record for me. That said, one thing I was a bit concerned with was the discrepancy in my time splits:

As you can see, my times got progressively slower  Now, I know that this is fairly normal but I also know that maintaining consistent speeds throughout a race is desirable also. I was OK with my overall time and with my average per mile, but I would really like to see my times remain consistent. So, I decided to start working on that.

I've also set myself a goal for my next race (The New Jersey Liberty Run) of a 12 minute/mile pace, which I think is realistic. To achieve this I'm actually trying for a pace of 11:40. The reason is this - when you run a race the actual distance you run is usually a bit farther that the stated length of the course. As an example, at the Unite race, the actual distance I ran according to iRunner as 13.43 miles. The reason this is true is because the stated distance of the course is the distance you would run if you took the absolutely most efficient path through the course. Since this is pretty much impossible, you end up running bit longer. So, since I want to hit a 12 minute mile according to the race clock, I need to get my pace to a bit quicker than that.

On the weekend after the Unite race I ran 4 miles. I tried running on a track to better be able to pace myself. On a track it's very easy to pace yourself, and my results were very good (ignore the last mile - it was not really a mile - and the first mile as it takes a bit to get going):

As I am now considering myself as "officially" training for my first full marathon, I have extended my weekday morning runs to 45 minutes. Since it takes my about 45 minutes to run 4 miles at the rate I am going for, I just figured I'd run 4 miles on my weekday runs. Here are my splits from one of these runs - pretty consistent except for the first mile but I need to get the time just a bit faster:

Finally, I tried this as well on a longer, 8-mile run. As you can see, fairly consistent but also a fair bit slower than I want. I will continue working on this: