Oh my word. Going fast is sooo hard! I ran over 7k yesterday (thought I’d mention that again 😉) so today was a rest day; but again, I had access to an athletics track for an hour...
So I thought... how fast can I run? I nearly broke myself last week doing a 5’13” kilometre. It wasn’t fun. Jell6 how do you run so fast over distance?!!! Tell me your secret! I thought this week I’d walk briskly for a km, then run 1k in 4 lots of 250m, taking 30 seconds to recover between each.
Do you know, 250m is still a long way?! Oh my word. My fastest pace was 3’29”; average pace was 4’35” over the four sections. All achieved with a level of nausea. I thought I’d cool down with a slow km run but clearly lost all sense of pace and ran about 400m at 5’56” before walking the rest of the way.
My heart rate wasn’t as high as when I run the long runs. Perhaps it was too shocked at what was going on to keep up! And the Garmin loves the fast work; my VO2 max score pinged up a place to 40! Whoop whoop!
I keep reading stuff about how you need to train for speed; it doesn’t just increase naturally as you run more. There is a lot of stuff about 80% of your running being at a slow pace... but then there is stuff about training at the pace you want to run. I guess I am still seduced by the sub-30 5k and part of my reluctance to do a Parkrun is because... secretly... I’d like to run it in 30... and comfortably! I don’t ask for much... 🙄
Actually, you know the lady who I got chatting to at athletics club, who started running again? I saw her at Junior Parkrun at the weekend and we swapped numbers tonight with the aim of doing a Parkrun together... she says she runs at about 35 so it could be a really nice way to let go the speed ambitions and just take the plunge. What do you reckon?
Looking forward to a proper rest now.
Mojo returned
Experimental parkrun. Parental advisory: Muppeting content.
Two very different runs
Unexpected turn of events 
