Does the 5K include the walks?

[Babycat-13]

I'm getting a bit ahead of myself here as I'm only on week 7. But I'm wondering if people include the 5 minute walks at the start and end in their times.

I'm trying not to start strava until my actual run starts and then stop it before the cool down walk so I can gauge what my pace is. However, today I ran 25 minutes and only covered 3.5K. If i'd included my walks I'm sure it would have been 5k but it feels like that's cheating lol.

Just wondering what others do?

[Blackberrypie Graduate]

What matters is your own progress, so basically just be consistent and do what is most meaningful for you. I am about to do a distance based run/walk challenge so I will certainly be logging my warm up and cool down walks to count towards that! However I also like to have a rough idea of my running pace and used to run two different trackers so I had both total distance/time and run distance/time. I now have a garmin and have set up workouts with warm up and cool down phases, which means it automatically shows me the run time/distance/pace which is definitely easier!

[Babycat-13 Graduate in reply to Blackberrypie]

Thank you. Would you recommend a Garmin? That sounds like a good device if you can set up different phases.

[Blackberrypie Graduate in reply to Babycat-13]

I've only had mine a few days but it does seem to work well (I have the forerunner 45s).

[Reggit Graduate]

I didn’t, but now have set up the 10k training plan on my garmin watch. That does record the warm up/cool down walks. I manually crop them from the Strava log. Upto you though how you record it. I was at 4.4k at the end of week 9 and still can’t better 33/34 min 5k! You’re not doing bad at all.

Keep it up 😆

[Babycat-13 Graduate in reply to Reggit]

Thanks!

[00marks Graduate]

Most people don’t include the walk at the beginning and end. The important thing is that you run for a certain amount of time and not the distance you cover.

[Babycat-13 Graduate in reply to 00marks]

Yes that makes sense. I took part in a 10k last year but continually stopped and walked parts so the main thing for me is definitely the running continuously. Thanks.

[Neverhare Graduate]

Parkruns are not on at the moment, but you can do a Not-Parkrun, where you log a 5k distance, whether walking or running, or a mixture of both, you record a time and can track your progress (you have to register for Parkrun). I do a 5k route from home for this and it does include the walks at start and finish. I am currently on 40 minutes for a 5k walk/run. However I only run for 4k as that is my max at present.