Evil Laura, you foul harridan...

[angrboda]

20 minutes of running. No walking save the warm up and warm cool down bits.

I managed it. Barely. It was not only difficult, it was very very VERY difficult. I was back to the point where I could have walked significantly faster than I was running

I had been running for a while and thought I must have made it through the first five minutes, but I wasn't expecting Evil Laura to say anything, because before, she's usually done the halfway point and the last 60 seconds. So after having run for another few hours, I was dismayed to hear her say, "you have been running for five minutes."

20 minutes is a loooooooooong time.

The good thing is I only need to do this one time. Week 6 is like week 5 with three different sessions, only the week 6 ones are slightly more difficult than week 5, and the first two week 6 are a step down in difficulty from the 20 minutes, so I'll just move on to week 6 and repeat as many times as I can for day 3 of that week.

Argh, pacing

[liv]

I'm still running pretty regularly, just have been forgetting to update here. Which is silly, cos the community's in a lovely active phase lately and I'd like to join in with that.

I'm really struggling at the moment with starting out too fast, and getting tired, not so much that I can't go on at all, but enough that I'm getting slower and slower over the run and ending up with a slower average time than I know I'm capable of.

Last Sunday I did 5k along the river from our place in Cambridge. Total time was 41'20'' but basically I was doing 8½' /km or a bit over pretty much the whole way, apart from the first km which I ran in under 7½ minutes. Thursday I ran on the hilly route near campus. A friend called me just as I was setting out to warm up, so I ended up walking along chatting to her, and starting the run about half way along my normal route. So I ran downhill along the railway, and I did the first 20 minutes at a pretty sensible pace, well under 8½ ' /km. Only I just lost it over the last km and nearly ground to a halt, ending with only 3.5 km in 30 minutes.

And today, back in Cambridge, I literally just got slower and slower and slower over the course of the run. First 2km in under 15 minutes (!), next 2 km in 17 minutes and that was a struggle, and the last km, when I normally speed up cos I know the end is in sight, took more than 9 minutes, so 42 minutes overall. I honestly didn't think I was going that fast at the start, I was surprised when Runkeeper gave me the times. And I just found the whole thing really hard, not physically, but psychologically, I was constantly fighting the impulse to just give up and walk, even though my lungs and my legs were basically fine. Even when I only had three minutes to go, I was stuck in a slough of "don't wanna!

I'm thinking I might turn on Runkeeper settings to give me a bit more feedback, maybe more frequent time-checks or perhaps setting a goal pace. My main aim at the moment is to improve my fitness, only secondarily to improve my running technique, so it doesn't matter too much if I rely on the gadget to help me with pacing.

And as of today I have been running regularly every week for 2 years, so that's something to be proud of.