Trying something a bit different

Me In My Shocking Pink Rugby Refereeing Jersey

So, with Storm Dennis heading in my general direction, but not yet making a menace of himself, I decided to head out along the coast to Dunbar to make Lochend Woods the venue for parkrun #15. It was grey, it was a bit damp, but the winds had still to pick up and, all in all, it wasn't too bad a morning for me and the 55 other runners who headed out.

I decided, today, to do something a bit different. Usually, I just go out and run, and see how it goes, but today I thought I'd try and work a little on my speed. The Lochend Woods route is one of the flatter routes near me, so it fitted with my experiment.

I'd taken the various weekly programmes of W1 - W4 of the Couch to 5k programme and turned them into workouts. Instead of walking and running, the idea was that I would comfortably jog what had been the walking elements, and then pick up the tempo for the running sections. I'm not actually all that bothered about my pace, but I thought it might be interesting to put some intervals back into my running (never did I think I would ever say those words). This week, I chose the W1 version, with a 5 minute warm-up jog, 8 x 1 minute higher tempo sections, 7 x 1.5 minute easy recovery sections and a final 5 minute easy cool down section that should, in theory, get me close to the finish.

It didn't quite work out that way.

The wheels came off at about 22 minutes and I had walk the recovery section. Clearly if I'm going to do this, I need to temper the tempo bits, but lesson learned.

Annoyingly, my "workout" ended when I was still about 0.5k from the finish, so I don't have my own time for the route. The official time from the results page was 30:32 so, while not my fastest parkrun, it was a PB on that particular course and, despite walking for ~90 seconds, I knocked 58 seconds of my previous PB on that route.

So, all in all, it worked out pretty well, I just need to find a happier medium between the tempo and the easy segments.

Comments

So, this happened...

Back at the start of March, after an 8 month lay-off, I picked up where I left off on week 2 and restarted my Couch to 5k journey. I completed the plan on 7 May, running 5k in a time of 39:21. Today, just shy of 4 months later, I ran 10k non-stop for the first time in my life with a time of 1:19:36. It hadn't been my intention to run that far tonight; I wasn't due to make my first attempt at the distance until next week. Tonight I was aiming for 8.5-9k but it just felt right and I kept going and, well, the result is what it is... Feeling dead chuffed with my achievement, but I need to thank everyone on the forum for their encouragement and support at all points along this journey and (I'm sure) for the continued encouragement on what is still to come. I'm off to give my poor legs a well earned rub down...

One run, two more PBs

It's been that kind of week. At the start of the year I set myself the following goals for 2020: See how much lower I could take my 5k PB below 28:38 Get my 10k PB below one hour from 1:03:49 Get my 10 mile PB below 1:45:00 from 1:49:29 Get my Half Marathon PB below 2:30:00 from 2:30:23 I haven't really been doing anything specific towards reducing them, although on Monday , I did a sprint interval session and brought my 5k time down to 28:04. I was meant to be running the Edinburgh Kilomathon tomorrow, which is a 13.1k run through the city, stating at Ocean Terminal and ending in Murrayfield Stadium. Alas, due to CORVID-19, this event, like so many others is currently on hold. Since I wasn't going to be able to do that run, I decided to do my own thing today. Rather than run 13.1k, I decided to push on and go for 13.1 miles. The result; two more of my goals achieved. My 10 mile PB now stands at 1:44:54, and my Half Marathon PB is down to 2:21:21. My 10k PB...

Two years ago, having finally shaken of the tendonitis that had put paid to my first attempt at the Couch to 5k plan, I finally put all the excuses behind me, laced up my shoes that had been gathering dust since I unboxed them at Christmas, and started my running journey in earnest. There were a couple of "training runs" along the way, but I completed the programme in May 2019 and quickly moved on to JuJu's 10k plan which got me to 10k on 1 July that year. Before 2019 was finished, I'd get to 10 miles in October and my first HM in November and, by the time the bells rang in 2020, I'd clocked up over 500 miles. Then, 2020... Well, actually, from a running perspective, it turned out better than anticipated. Yes, OK, so the final parkrun was a year ago this weekend just past, and all the organised events I'd entered were cancelled or postponed until some indeterminate point in the future, but running, it seemed, was an escape and helped my cope with the whole...

Finding My Inner Runner

Search This Blog