I’m having a strange time with this plan. I haven’t done the runs in order. I mostly haven’t done the right length run. I’m not planning on doing all the runs this “week” before moving on. This is the beauty of the NRC plan though. Endlessly adaptable and it give you ticks. Sometimes that’s what you need!
I had plans this morning and nothing seemed to go right. It was a beautiful day yesterday and I couldn’t run. Today, it was grey, windy, cold and miserable but there was a window. Looks like it was a run day! I had Pilates booked at 1030am so figured I could arrive at 930am, run for half an hour before, shower and change then use the Pilates class as a really good stretch afterwards. I had fifteen minutes of a podcast to finish and a fourteen minute run to do. Perfect. Even my garmin was telling me to do a thirty minute recovery run.
This would all have worked perfectly except I sat around for too long at home and arrived late. Only 40 minutes. Still, it was an easy run so I could skip the shower until afterwards and not stand too close to anyone….
Off I went. Mr Garmin wanted a slow pace for me and I was mostly enjoying it. The wind wasn’t much fun in my face but the run felt quite chilled. I was so engrossed in my podcast that I didn’t realise I’d taken a couple of wrong turns in an unfamiliar area and didn’t quite know where I was. Fifteen minutes had passed so I loaded up coach B.
My first thought was that it’s quite difficult to keep to an easy pace when suddenly you need to be back at the leisure centre and you can’t figure how to get there. I had a little jog in the wrong direction and then figured where I’d gone wrong, and that I was actually quite a long way away. Still, I knew where I needed to go and that was a great position to be in! Coach B was telling me to keep it easy, my watch was indignant that I was going “too fast” but if there was any chance of getting back I time, it was time to load up “tempo mode”. This was actually quite fun. The traffic was bad and I ended up overtaking a load of (very slow!!) cars. Coach B asked me to pick up the pace and I was pleased to find the next gear up also felt challengingly comfortable. He had a few fun questions for distraction but I was mainly distracting myself with what time I’d arrive at Pilates and in what state!
I made it with a couple of minutes to spare. No time for anything other than a quick drink and reset of the ponytail. It wasn’t the run I planned but I enjoyed the commentary from Coach B, even though it didn’t bear much relation to what I ended up running!!! My watch was unhappy. Coach B would probably have been unhappy. I had a big smile though!
Hope some of you have done this run as it was supposed to be!
NRC ‘Another 10K Run’
