This is going to be a long update, since I’ve neglected blogging my workouts since last week…
It all started on Friday, when I forgot to take a sports bra to the gym. That’s a critical item, so I just showered and went back to work, planning on running my "benchmark" workout outside in the evening. But it was dark and rainy when I got home so I never did it.
On Saturday, a trip to REI with friends turned into an all-day adventure and they didn’t leave until late. But I had just enough time to squeeze in that 15-minute run before it got really dark. Then, my tracker screwed up– it’s not a very good benchmark if I don’t know how fast I was going, eh– so it wound up just being a short, pretty fast run (and for future reference, I should avoid running along the stretch of road without streetlights when I’m going to be running in the dark…)
Okay, Sunday then! I actually did the benchmark run, which was 7 minutes warmup, 3 minutes all out, and 5 minutes cooldown. The all out section was uphill too, which was a fun time. Overall pace was 11’37" and the fast part was around 10:00. After that I was tired but it was only 15 minutes– so I queued up the recovery run I missed (another 15 minutes, c’mon Nike+) and did that one too at a more leisurely pace.
Today I was back at the gym for a quickie bicep/tricep lifting session, followed by a treadmill ‘long run’ of 30 minutes, and then some elliptical. The run was 2.52mi/11’57".
I’m extremely skeptical of this running plan so far. It just doesn’t seem like it has the mileage I need to get truly comfortable with 5k again… but I’m going to give it the benefit of the doubt and abuse the short workouts to work on getting faster. I can see in later weeks long runs of 3+ miles, so maybe it just ramps up. Tomorrow I have a 10-minute tempo run? So I guess I can see what "comfortably hard" means when I’m doing much less of it…
Running While Fat 