Week 2 day 2

[liv]

Another lunchtime run. The sun is shining, but it's one of those cold, clear autumn days and I thought it might be too cold for me. But actually I was fine. I headed to the bigger park the other side of the hospital so that I didn't have to run around in circles as much as in the cemetery.

Anyway, long story short: I managed an average pace faster than 6 kph, including the walking warmup. It's a bit of a pathetic milestone, but at least my 9 minutes of running plus 16-18 minutes of walking is now faster than just walking briskly the whole way!

I think yesterday's workout giving me the confidence I actually can do week 2 let me push myself a bit harder. I think most of the improvement was in walking faster during the recovery sections, not running faster, but it's still exercise! It may also have helped that it was dry-ish overnight so I was running on soft, but not waterlogged, grass, which I couldn't do yesterday.

I discovered it takes 6 minutes to walk from my front door, through the hospital, to the park, so my warmup was actually 6 minutes rather than 5. I don't want to start running in the hospital, there's too much traffic and awkward junctions, but a six-minute power-walk trip to the park works quite well. The downside of this location is that by the end of the run I'm at the bottom of a big hill and have to walk home. (I turned off Runkeeper for that part!)

Week 2 Day 2

[rmc28]

Success!

Done yesterday, on the way home from work.  I took a slightly different route which gave me more chances of crossing the big busy road that cuts across all my possible commutes home, as last week I had to basically stand and wait to cross.  I'll do that route again in future, it has a handy loop which I can go round more times if/when I get faster, but yesterday delivered me to my door 10 seconds after the end of the cool down.

No stitches this time, I paid more attention to running slowly enough that I was ok, and even when it started to rain towards the end of the run I was still ok and content/enjoying the endorphins (also I had a Bond songs mix to run to which I was loving).  Even so, I'm still basically hovering around the 2 mile mark with no appreciable further distance even though I'm exercising for 30s longer and running for 60s longer.

My general fitness seems to be improving: walking my commute has been a bit faster this week than last - from 17:40 min/mile down to 16:58 min/mile.  I once could powerwalk at 14:30 min/mile but only while getting nicely sweaty, but I'd like to see whether I could reach 16 min/mile without getting too hot (at least winter helps for that).