I graduated last Thursday and spent a couple of days feeling pleased with myself and wondering about the what next. So I read Ian's post which was great and full of information and links that I wouldn't have known or found otherwise. But I have never run 5k, couldn't possibly do it in 30 mins and have been measuring my distance to include the 5 min warm up/down. So yesterday morning I decided to work out what 5k looked like on my run by the river. I just started to time my run from the end of the warm up point and trundled off. Not feeling ready to run without a guide I was listening to a guided run found on Nike Run Club - Andy Puddicombe from Headspace guiding a morning run for non-morning people - can highly recommend it! Calm music, contemplative & thoughtful interruptions etc. And I just kept going, worked out that I needed to go a lot further than I thought to find the half way turning round point and trundled on.... meeting about 50 other runners coming in the opposite direction on some kind of organised event and not minding too much. I ran about 4.2k without realising and broke the first rule which was not to increase my distance by more than 10%! Today I can feel the effects of that.....
But I think I've got a plan which is to work on increasing speed (using the podcasts) for two short 30 min runs a week, doing a longer run at the weekend to try and reach the 5k goal. I'll try and go a little bit further towards the half way mark on the short runs and do some intervals on the 5k weekend run so that I'm not increasing my running time too quickly. To do 5k in 30 mins I'll have to increase my speed by 33%! I wonder if that's even possible? And if so, how long it will take to achieve........ No idea if my plan is going to get me there so if anyone out there has any thoughts or other ideas please feel free to share them!