Bad Meaning Good

• Posted: July 8, 2008
• |
• Author: Shéamus
• |
• Filed under: Motivation, Workouts
• |
• Tags: 30 Minute Days, Bad Weather

I didn’t have high hopes for today’s run. The weather continues to be worse than terrible. Check out this video that I recorded a couple of hours before I started:

This really doesn’t do justice to how violent the waves were just moments before I clicked the record button, but you can hear the wind - it’s deafening.

Travelling home after picking up my son from school, I looked out the window and thought: how can I possibly run in this?

Priorities, priorities.

I set out with two goals today:

1. To have at least one decent mile
2. To complete the full 30-minutes

The latter was very important; while yesterday’s time trial served a purpose, I figured that a third day of less than the full thirty might be the beginning of a mental slump.

Before we go on, check out my splits:

Chart:

That looks like a failure, right? 8:12/mile? That’s the speed I was running four days ago. But that was in near optimum conditions (certainly relatively). Those splits are actually a massive success. Here’s why.

I ran just before a quarter to five, and opened at a slightly scary pace of better than 6:30/mile. I didn’t plan on maintaining it forever, but to be honest at that moment it felt pretty good.

It didn’t last - within a minute I was running into yet another full-on headwind and my pace collapsed down to 8:30, and verged between there and almost 9-minutes/mile for as long as I care to remember. It was painful. The wind was brutal. I knew my turnaround point was approximately 1.25 miles so I just did the best I could to hang on.

It was some monumental effort on my part that I opened with an 8:14 mile. Once I reached the turnaround, it took a good 2-3 minutes just to find my legs again. They were totally fried.

Approaching 1.5 miles, something changed. I started to feel pretty good. With the wind now slightly behind me, I picked it up. Around 2.25 miles, I was actually clipping close to 7-minutes/mile. It felt great. It told me two things - one, that I could get stronger in consecutive miles, and two, that in optimum conditions, and well-rested, I could and will run pretty fast. Certainly sub 7:30.

For the first time today, mile 2 was better than mile 1, and mile 3 was better than mile 2. My opening splits were 8:14, 8:09 and an impressive 7:43.

After the 3 mile point, I again reached my final turnaround and again faced the wind full-on. It was simply too much, and my goal at that point simply became to finish. Which I did.

Incidentally, my 5KM time was only a few seconds slower than yesterday.

The overall pace was a dip, but there’s a lot here to be encouraged about. The wind is really, really prohibitive to fast consistent running speeds, but this boy done pretty good.

• (2) Comments
• Permalink
• RSS 2.0
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
•