Giving in and taking a break

[ewt]

My ankle got better, then I had a week of quite bad general joint pain, then I had moving house to contend with. I'm still moving, and my running stuff is not all in one place as a result, and I have more services than usual to prepare for.

I'd like to get back to running, but realistically this is probably going to have to wait until January. I'm struggling not to mentally berate myself over this, but I think I will be even worse if I tell myself that of course I can keep going/restart now, and then fail to do it because the logistics are silly.

A disadvantage of walking until I feel warmed up (rather than for a set amount of time), and walking/stretching between running intervals until the shin pain goes below a certain level, is that I never know exactly how long a session will take; that makes it harder to fit in, even with my fairly flexible and variable schedule.

I think I will try for twice a week in January, though: stretches and/or extra time between running intervals seems to do more for the shin pain than only running once a week did.

Week 5 Day 3

[rmc28]

Success!  I ran 20 minutes continuously!

It was hard work and I ended it hot but with a big endorphin-and-success buzz.  I think I basically covered the same distance as Day 2 as I followed a near-identical route, but RunKeeper failed to record the distance.   I did have some doubts during the run as to whether I could manage it, but stuck with it, kept my pace nice and slow, and it worked.

I enjoyed having finished very much.  I think now I'm confident I can finish, I am more likely to enjoy the actual running too.

It has generally been too cold for me to contemplate running after dark this week; I am turning my mind to logistics so I can run in daylight Mon, Wed, Fri next week.  It makes all the difference.

Week 8 complete

[liv]

I did that thing of getting straight out of bed and heading to the gym, planning to shower and put on clean clothes after I exercised. Which would be rather more impressive if I'd woken up before midday, but hey.

Anyway, made it to 24½ minutes at 7.2 kph, so 7/8 of the workout before completing the last 3½ minutes at 6.8 kph. I think I was right to slow down when I did, even though it was fairly close to the end, because I needed to take my inhaler by the end of the workout. My usual trick of telling myself to keep going until I only have a small fraction left, at which point I might as well complete the whole thing, isn't working as well now that even "the last 10%" is 3 minutes of running, hard to do when you're already barely keeping going at the end of a workout.

The distance wasn't measurably further than day 2, 3.8 km in 33 minutes including the warmup. But still, 24½ minutes at the faster pace instead of 21 minutes is still progress, and I think I've reached another stage where I'm genuinely close to the limit of what I can physically do. So I'll keep working at this to push that limit. The increment from 28 to 30 minutes next week should be possible, even if I have to slow down for the last part, and I'm hoping to break 4 km!