Friday 21 October 2011

At last some running success


Well all in all it took me 10 weeks to get back to being able to run 5k again due to my injury. But I'm back strong.
I had an initial couple of 5ks, felt pretty tiring but I just plugged along with them.

I've gone back to trying Hal Higdon's 13.1 novice plan and did my first "Long run" of 4 miles (6.5k) on Sunday. I had to do it in intervals and my time wasn't great, but I completed my longest ever run. Since then I've had two 5k runs that have felt great.

On Tuesday, around the 4k mark, I looked down at my watch and thought I had a good chance of beating my 5k record so I pushed very hard (uphill all the way to!). I did beat my record with a 30:50 time.
On Thursday, I just thought to myself that if I had pushed a little harder earlier on, I could have hit that target of a sub 30 minutes 5k. So with Garmin primed and the "Virtual Partner" set to 6:00min/km for 5k (exactly 30 minutes), I set off.....

After about 1.5k, I looked down at the Garmin, I was 110 metres ahead! I felt like I could drop off the pace a little bit and though I had, but at 2.5k I was 200 metres ahead. The furthest I observed myself being ahead was 232 metres. I knew that although the last 1km is steep uphill, I still felt strong enough to not slip back and I was jubilant even then. I finished in 28:15 and was over the moon.

To have come from a place where I didn't think I could take up running again to this is wonderful.

I've not really kept up with the P90x as the running has come to the forefront again. I will still use some of the workouts in between though.

One negative point is that my big toe is sending shooting pains up my leg when I put pressure on it a certain way. Hopefully it's just something very minor.

Another 6.5k run on Sunday!

My latest Triumph on DM HERE