Friday 23 August. 12.45pm. Sunny with a light breeze. 20°C
Runner of four years here getting back into things after an injury.
Back in North Manchester for a bit. I'm hoping to do parkrun tomorrow morning but don't want to overcook things today ahead of that.
I forgot the rule of the weather forecaster: once you've looked at the charts and forecasts, have a look outside just to check. I was expecting a chill breeze and dressed appropriately (same as Wednesday). It wasn't chilly at all. In fact the sun came out a few minutes after I'd stepped outside.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. The first thing was to find the kit and the shoes that I'd packed to travel back. After turning over everything in the house I remembered I'd left some stuff in the car boot, and – Hey presto! – that's where it was.
I kit up, do a few dynamic stretches (slow squats mainly) and get outside.
I'm doing my usual two mile route, with a slight deviation at the end, but we'll get to that.
Up the hill for the warm up walk. The elevation gain on this is about 25m.
There's a set of temporary traffic lights with nothing inside the work area. However, when I got back on Wednesday evening, there were a pair of water board tankers in there. I suspect that they're working on the covered reservoir at the very top of the hill again. There were some emergency works there at the start of 2023 and I suspect they're doing some planned preventative work now.
I'm just at these lights when the watch beeps for the start of the run interval. I've set an upper bound on the heart rate that my watch will consider acceptable.
Most running watches will class your current heart rate into one of a number of zones. This one uses five zones, with 1 being the easiest and 5 being "you're going to keel over if you keep this up for more than a minute". I set it have zone 2 as the target. For me that's between 136 and 148 beats per minute.
This was mainly to have the watch tell me off each time I had a temptation to zoom off. Mostly it worked, if it wasn't for those pesky hills.
My first task was to cross the road to the other pavement. That was much simpler than usual because of the traffic lights stopping the traffic. Then up to the top, past the off licence, the pub and the bus stop, then a right turn towards the high school. Several water board tankers were parked in the school (closed for summer) car park. So that's where they were hiding them!
There's a path that goes down the side of the school (photo above). It's got a little overgrown. I met a lad on an electric scooter and a lady with two friendly dogs. I offered them a sniff of the back of my hand and one of them followed me for a little while. The path drops to a dip then climbs up again before dropping more steeply towards the college on one side and some woods on the other.
At the college's access road another right turn, down across the old bridge and a steep climb up to the traffic lights on the main road. The watch definitely didn't like that climb as my HR went up to 160-ish.
Another right turn onto the Home Straight on the main road. There's a little rise, then it's a gentle slope, past the other high school, towards the end.
Except… today I wanted to check whether the chippy was open. I'd tried to use their online order-for-collection form, but it said the chippy was shut until the 20th (today's the 23rd). So another right turn and a slight climb towards the little roundabout that the chippy's on. I had to run past the chippy by about 20m before the watch was satisfied I'd done the set distance.
I walked back and popped my head in the doorway. "Online ordering isn't working." "When did you try?" "About an hour ago." "That would be about when I fixed it." "Thanks! See you later then."
I walked on then back towards the main road. Reaching it I decided I'd had enough slow stuff, and did an impromptu sprint to the next junction, only stopping because if I hadn't I'd have barrelled into a family group on the pavement.
Then a short walk to the chemist (but that's just peanuts to space) to pick up some repeat prescriptions, and home.
Stats:
Duration: 35'50" (23'02" main run, 55" sprint)
Distance: 4.49km (3.22km main run, 240m sprint)
Splits by km: 7'04", 6'50", 7'28", (last 220m) 7'42"/km, then 3'44"/km for the sprint
The main part of the run was pretty much equivalent to a Week 5 run 3. Normally nowadays I'd do that sort of distance in about 18 minutes. The discipline of deliberately running slowly is a good one.
The toe feels OK, so I'm confident about doing the parkrun tomorrow morning. I will not be going for a Personal Best (PB).
Best of luck to our readers who are progressing through Couch to 5K normally. It's definitely worth it.
