10 March 2013

Learning about pacing

Good morning! Don't forget it's daylight savings today. You should put your clock forward one hour. Hopefully we can absorb the "yuck" of that lost hour of sleep today and going in to work tomorrow won't be too bad.
Yesterday I ran the longest distance that I've ever gone. Well, "ran" is probably not the correct word - I only ran for about 57 minutes, and walked for an additional 40 minutes or so. But my total distance was over 8 miles!

This makes me feel better about taking on the crazy challenge of 10 miles on April 21st.

One thing I realized as I was doing intervals was that I really need to be careful to keep my walking intervals short or my muscles cool down and trying to run again is much more difficult.
This is the danger of layering podcasts like I did yesterday. I used the run from week 6 of Freeway to 10K from Podrunner and then added on the run from week 3 of the NHS' Couch to 5K program. By playing one immediately after the other, I ended up with nearly 10 minutes of cool down/warm up before I did a running interval on the 5k one. This was just too long. My muscles got tight and even doing just a 90 second run was unpleasant.

 This is really good to realize because as I'm doing intervals, I tend to tell myself "I can just stretch the walking interval just one more minute...." in an effort to make things a bit easier. Now I know it's actually easier if I don't extend! Anyway - here's a video from the week before. If you donate, you can see my most recent video.