Bridge-to-10K: Week 3 Run 3

[IronMatt]

Time to cue up some Bon Jovi... because we are halfway there!

Thanks to jetlag, I was up well before the crack of dawn this morning. The Japanese village where I am staying is not particularly well-lit at night, so I waited until the sun rose over Tokai before setting out for the final Week 3 run.

As I mentioned in my B210k w3r2 post, I'm not all that familiar with the local roads, so I don't run according to a pre-planned route, nor can I make mental note of where I start and stop each running interval for charting later on-line. Thus, I decided to try out MapMyRun's GPS phone app today, hoping it would give me useful stats like those that I posted for earlier runs. The results were decidedly mixed.

Thanks to this app, I was able to come in and immediately view my run on a local map on my computer. That's pretty spiffy! (I know, I know -- all you owners of Garmin Forerunners and other GPS watches think this is old hat) However, the only statistics available were for the overall run and with 1km splits. Hurm. That's not so useful.

So I know that I covered 10.0 km in 65 minutes. However, that time includes the 5 minute warm-up, the 5 minute cool-down, and the two 1 minute walking intervals. So I can't directly compare with the 9.06 km that I ran in the three 17 minute w3r1 intervals at the start of the week.

Similarly, I've got a nifty graph of my speed, expressed in minutes per kilometer, throughout the run. The all of the walking portions -- the warm-up, cool-down, and 1 minute intervals -- are clearly visible. This gives me useful information that I haven't seen before; for instance, I tend to speed up near the end of a running interval. And my final 17 minute run started off slower than the other two (though it ended at the quickest speed of the day, which was not accidental, as I knew I didn't have to pace myself anymore near the end).

Well, that's all great... but what I don't have is the information I want most: How far did I go in each of the three 17 minute runs? I've got no way to extract that from this information.

Does anyone have another GPS Android app that they might recommend? I'm open to suggestions and happy to try anything out. I've got five more runs before I get back to Oxford, and it would be nice to have some stats as I move along.

Meanwhile, the other big news is that WEEK 3 IS DONE!!!

As I said at the beginning, this means that Bridge-to-10K is now half-completed. Holy macaroni! Week 4 doesn't worry me very much, as it is only a slight increase -- three 18 minute runs per session, instead of the three 17 minute runs of Week 3. But Week 5 starts to get scary near the end -- can I _really_ manage two back-to-back 30 minute runs (with only a minute of walking in-between) in just a fortnight from now? Guess we're going to find out!

I'm delighted at how many of us are making good headway through the Bridge-to-10K plans! For everyone in the [first] 10K Class of 2013, we all deserved lots of kudos and congratulations!!

Happy running, everyone!

[MrsBirdsnest Graduate]

Hi Matt,

Not sure about distance for each interval, but just checked my Runkeeper app and it definately gives you average pace per split so you could compare your intervals with that. Hope you find something that works for you. How amazing to be running in Japan and you get to avoid running in all this snow too! Well done and keep it up.

[IronMatt Graduate in reply to MrsBirdsnest]

"Runkeeper", huh? I'll definitely give it a try -- thanks!

Does it allow you to adjust the splits? On the MapMyRun application, only 1km splits are accessible. That doesn't help much when I want to break the workout into 5 mins, 17 mins, 1 min, 17 mins, 1 min, 17 mins, 5 mins!

(And, yes, it's a rather lovely change of scenery to be running here for a couple of weeks. Plus, no snow is an added bonus! )

[MrsBirdsnest Graduate in reply to IronMatt]

You can split it however you like; time or distance. It's quite customisable really! I changed from Mapmyrun to Runkeeper last autumn for this reason

[IronMatt Graduate in reply to MrsBirdsnest]

Oh, that's excellent! Thanks for the suggestion -- I'll go download it now, then give it a go on my next run (Tuesday). Fantastic!

[SBG356 Graduate]

Another great run Matthew! Do you see a familiarity here with C25K? A fear of what week 5 holds??!

Sue

[IronMatt Graduate in reply to SBG356]

Ha! Yes, what a great observation! It seems that Week 5 Run 3 is destined to be dreaded!

I'll keep fingers crossed that, as scary as it sounds, the Bridge-to-10K w5r3 (30 min run, 1 min walk, 30 min run) passes as smoothly as the Couch-to-5K w5r3 (20 min run) did back in September!

[Pearsey]

Ha! Ha! I was thinking exactly the same as Sue when I was reading your blog Matthew-fear of the unknown

Well done for completing week 3

Keep in Running

Colette

[IronMatt Graduate in reply to Pearsey]

Thanks, Colette!

I have to admit, these extended sessions can definitely be a bit of a struggle. Given that I'm "only" covering about 9k in these runs, my mind boggles at how people can run nearly five times that distance in a marathon!

Then I remember that I'm running 51 minutes... which is over _six_ times as much as the 8 minutes that you get by combining ALL the Couch-to-5K Week 1 intervals. That was a challenge for me just a few months ago. I got through that; I can get through this!

How are you? Any more progress? *fingers crossed* Definitely looking forward to when you can join us once again!!

[Rollertoaster Graduate]

Well done! 10K! Wooooop! OK you have walking and cool downs etc, but the magical figure is achieved! Now just to cut out those walking bits.

Glad you've tried Mapmyrun and like the extra info you can have, but regarding your questions, to be honest I think all of them are pretty similar in that you can't customise them to leave out the walking bits between intervals. I know you can set Endomondo to pause when you're not moving (crossing a road or whatever) and you can manually pause Mapmyrun, but with the free versions I don't think any of them do exactly what you want. My best suggestion is that while you're walking, that you finish logging and then start a new run for the next interval so then it would show up as 2 or 3 (however many intervals you now have) separate runs.

Does that make sense? It sounds fiddly but once you get used to it, you can probably do it quite quickly. Also I never log the 5 mins walk at the start and finish as I find it skews the logged sped overall run a lot, especially on shorter (!) 5K runs.

[Rollertoaster Graduate in reply to Rollertoaster]

hmm.. reading Mrsbirdsnest's comment above, I could be completely wrong and may also switch to Runkeeper!

[IronMatt Graduate in reply to Rollertoaster]

*nods* I'm going to give it a try on Tuesday, for my next run. Will almost certainly post my thoughts on it in the next update. Somewhere along the way, I seem to have de facto committed to doing for B210k what I never did with C25k -- making a blog post for each run. (Whoops!) So we shall see.

Looking forward to hearing how you get on with it, too. If there's a free app that will do this, t'would be great! I'm not going to pay MapMyRun (or anyone else) for a premium service. After a year or so of monthly fees, it will simply have been cheaper to buy a Garmin Forerunner!

Also, I like your point in the earlier post about how I've now hit the magic number of 10K, if you count the twelve minutes of walking from the warm-up, cool-down, and the intervals between runs. That's about 12 minutes of walking mixed in with 51 minutes of running (give or take). So effectively, I need to convert 12 minutes of walking into 9 minutes of running to get 10K run in one hour. Should be do-able! Yay!

[Pearsey]

Well Matthew I seemed to be progressing. Doing lots of small runs when I'm out and about-twinges still though, so erring on the side of caution with that. Also inevitably I have lower back pain on the left side-same side as knee injury. Posture out of sync, so doing exercises for that too now. One positive is that my weight remains the same, following a blip last week where I was a kg higher. Was really expecting another hike this morning, but no, back to exactly where I was when I had to stop running in November. I was so itchy to get out there and run in the snow, it took all my will power not to. Another positive now is that I can walk at warm up/cool down pace for a long time, with no ill effects.-just the small bit of gentle running sets it off.

I MUST BE PATIENT.........! Oh heck I can't go on like this! I really do think I must get out there-then I think of the affect of it might set me back. Osteopath said no twinges before I can run again.

Don't worry you will be the first to know when I have done it. Headline back to Running after a long break, I think. Maybe B10 in front of that, hmmmm. Time to think about that one, lol!!

Go for week 4 Matthew and....

Keep on Running!

Colette

[IronMatt Graduate in reply to Pearsey]

I'll be cheering loudly for you when you are finally able to get back out there, Colette! Meanwhile, you are wise not to rush it. Well done in showing self-restraint!

You know, you've got a good point about the 10K running. I think there's an "Ease into 10K" plan that takes you from 3 minutes of running all the way up to 10K in ten weeks. Might be more interesting than doing C25k all over again, if you can manage the initial 3 minute runs. (I know a year ago, 3 minutes of running would have killed me! ) If not, of course, there's always Laura and the lovely C25k music! *grin*

Either way, I'll be thrilled to see one of the most enthusiastic runners that I know of able to get off the sidelines at last and take her proper place once more!

[Pearsey]

[ChrisL Graduate]

The iSmoothRun app will give you stats for each interval that you program into it. Unfortunately I believe it is iPhone only - not Android.