Work dominates again, but pace keeps going down

Tokyo, Week 5, Day 7; 30-minute walk.
Tokyo, Week 6, Day 2; 3 miles, 8:38/mile.
Tokyo, Week 6, Day 6; 7 miles, 8:18/mile.

Last week, after work took a bite out of my running time, I ended up doing my running and cross training only on Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday. This week, after work took a bite out of my running time, I ended up doing my running and cross training only on Tuesday, Saturday and (if all goes as planned) Sunday. This upcoming week, I'm hoping to break out of the pattern and get a full week of runs in, but I make no promises.

I ended last week with a 30-minute walk. I had been planning a nice long bike ride, but I got lazy so I decided I'd just do a walk on the cross training day. Once again, I brought my eldest daughter along for the trip (on her bike), but I also thought I'd bring my youngest along in her stroller. That worked well until, about 10 minutes out, she didn't like the headwind blowing in her face and started crying. My biking daughter at that point was way ahead of us, so I couldn't just turn around, but had to keep going with a crying baby through Shirokanedai until I could catch up to the biker. The baby didn't stop crying until we got home, but that didn't prevent the cross training from working its magic; I was much less sore after it than before.

The week kicked off on a typical day off, and then on Tuesday I went out for an easy three miles. The Wednesday and Thursday runs got displaced (and the back-up day of Friday was not available), so that brings me to today.

Today I didn't manage to get in a run until just around the time it was getting dark. I went out at a pace that felt comfortable, but I think there were a few things that were making me push things a bit. The first was that, because I hadn't run for a few days, I felt like I needed to get in a better run than I would have otherwise. The second was impatience; I saw my wife cooking up some pakora as I was leaving, and it looked good so I wanted to get back to eat that. (That's the joy of training based on distance rather than time; run faster and you're done sooner.) And the third was that I didn't want to break the sub-9:00/mile seal that I put on my easy runs a few weeks back.

The result was 8:18/mile, and I can't say I felt like I was really pushing it during the run, or that I'm tired afterwards. It does seem kind of odd to me though that I'm running less but my pace continues to drop.