Yippee ! So many milestones today to chase the blues of Tier 4 away ! Good job I’d already made no plans for Xmas. 🥺 well - tomorrow is the shortest day, I’m going to celebrate this achievement and look forward to longer days and being able to go for a run at sunset without skipping work !
This was my long run-walk on week 6 of my HM plan with Jeff Galloway. I’ve been struggling with the run-walk thing, first accepting it’s legitimate, secondly not being able to count my intervals, when to run or walk ! Two weeks ago I cheated on Jeff and ran the whole way, clocking up longest run to date at 13km/8miles, discovering muscles in my quads I’d never known existed ! This week the plan for for 6.5 miles/10.46km (with two lots of warm up/cool down of 10 mins either side). I decided I would give Jeff another chance (!) but decided to adapt the method - and since my watch counts down in km I decided I’d take a slow ‘30 second’ walk (ie 4 paces for a ’second’) at the beginning of each km. That meant I was effectively running for 7mins / walking just under a minute. It seemed to work for me - I was always pleasantly surprised when the watched buzzed another 1km ‘lap’ though I did get steadily more tired and slower. Then I decided in the cool down I’d switch to 60/30 second ratio - but then the programme finished and I’d done 12.94km - well I just had to continue - this had to be longer than last time !! So I pushed it over 13k and was still about 1k from home so decided to push it on. Then realised that 9miles would be 14.5k ish, so had to reach that, and well, how about 15 ?! So I really pushed the last km was hard work even run-walk especially as it was uphill, but did it !! Hurrah !! So 9.34 miles in the end or 15k - and 1 hour 57 & 44 seconds - gah ! I should have kept up another 2 mins and could have claimed 2 hours !! Oh well - I did still climb 4 flights after turning off the Garmin so reckon that’s ok then. So now I’m thinking - 10 miles for new year ?!
Bit peeved that End to End haven’t sent me a postcard for the half way point - surely that’s a key milestone ! Ho hum. 141 miles done in 2 months - 127 miles to go and 3 months to do it, so I’m well on track. However, they did send me photo of my ‘sapling’ somewhere not far from the Firth of Clyde (which I opted for instead of a T-shirt), which is very nice Christmas pressy. 🌳
Basking in my 15k glory, (10k PB was 1:15:11 according to strava) despite having walked bits of it - off to bake some mince pies now. 🥧🥧 ouch - bit stiff !! Better keep moving ! 😎
week3run1 ✅. 3 x 17 mins with 1 min walks. 
How did your parkrun or (not)parkrun go?
