Haha I know quite a few people who are much quicker uphill than down, easier on the quads.

At a 6:40 pace I’d be suggesting just to shorten your stride a little, almost feels like skipping along the top of the ground a bit and keep it up, it’s hard to do it at the start. And really just focus on doing more distance but slower. Aim to do 80% of your weekly mileage at a heart rate between 115-140 and see how your body feels.

160 is a low cadence when running but so much plays into it. Fatigue at that moment, whether you’re actually interested in what you’re doing, what you’ve eaten and how that makes you feel.

Cadence shouldn’t be measured over 30 seconds and extrapolated though in my opinion. Measuring it over the course of your run, then seeing the trend is really the only concrete way to know what it is. Could you have kept that up over 5 minutes? 20 minutes? Too much plays into that short moment.

It’s likely not your stride at all tbh. It’s probably more fitness than anything right now that determines how fast you run that 1.5km in. But faster speed work as part of a training program generally just pushes your cadence higher anyway.

But manually measuring cadence when you’re talking about 170-190 steps per minute will be extremely difficult. Give it a go though.

I run marathons; typically you’ll see elites will high cadences across races (for marathons I’ve heard it’s around 190 for elites). For us mortals, running a higher cadence reduces the force from a long stride going through your legs when impact on the ground occurs. It also promotes faster turnover which drives efficiency in stride.

I run marathons.

A generally accepted training methodology involves slow runs being the bulk of your weekly mileage. Most plans involve three key workouts. A speed day, a threshold day, and a long run day. The first two are faster efforts while the long run can be uptempo if you want but also slowed to ensure adaptation is occurring over the build.

Looking at OP’s cumulative weekly km’s, I feel they’re not exactly running a lot during the week relatively to a typical marathon plan. But imagine these three sessions take up 20k in a week, the remaining 40km being slower would reduce the average pace overall.