Week D2 day 1

[liv]

OK, last week was pretty much a wash-out, I only had one opportunity to run at all and only made 22.5 of my planned 30 minutes. So I decided to restart the week I'm thinking of as Week D with a clean slate.

I obviously wasn't going to try running outdoors in the snow / slush / ice. So I went to the gym late lunchtime, and gritted my teeth and made myself keep going for the full 30 minutes. It was harder than it should have been; I think partly my legs are tired from vigorous dancing at the weekend and from needing to use different muscles from normal to keep my balance in the slushy streets. I didn't want to give myself the option to quit again, so at 20 minutes in I slowed right down to 6.5 kph.

Anyway. 4 km in 35 minutes including the warmup, or 8'45'' /km. When I went to get changed, a woman in the changing room lavished me with praise for being able to keep going for so long when she can only manage 10 minutes at a time. I told her I'd had to work up to this gradually, but it did make me feel better about struggling to complete 30 minutes at the moment, when a week ago I was blithely doing 40.

Comments

[jack]

*hugs* Oh yay, well done for being able to keep going.

I think slowing down is definitely the right thing to do if you can. It's always depressing if you're not in an ever-ascending spiral of monotonically-increasing success, but if two-years-ago Rachel could see you, I think she'd be unspeakably impressed you could do half an hour at all, and think that occasional blips when you fall back from what you thought you could do is normal and the price of improving so much and you'll go on getting better as long as you keep up doing some of it.

[liv]

Thank you! Slowing down is definitely definitely much better than just giving up. Possibly I should getting more confidence on the treadmill so I can just turn down the speed until I feel up to running faster again, so more equivalent to what I do outdoors. But the problem is that once I'm tired enough to feel I need to slow down, I never really want to speed up again, so I usually try to keep going as far as I can at the faster pace.

TBH if 6-months-ago Rachel could see me, she'd faint at the thought of running two and half miles just like that! So you're quite right that I shouldn't feel discouraged that I'm not always improving week-to-week.