iRun365.com

Hi. I see you're new here. That's cool. To find out what this site is about, please read this page. You may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. It's free, you won't receive any spam from me (like, ever), but more importantly: you'll never miss a single word. Thanks for visiting!

Well, day fifty is in the bag!

It’s gone by pretty fast, to be honest, but looking back now it feels like a reasonable accomplishment. I’m not sure exactly how many miles I’ve done to date as I didn’t actually start tracking my mileage until I got my Garmin watch on July 2. Since then, it tells me I’ve done 79.24 miles. If we assume an average of three miles a day for the fifty, that’s over 150 miles in total. Okay, some people do that in a weekend, but it’s not a bad start.

I slept for ten hours last night. That’s the most I’ve had in literally months. I’m a big advocate of sleeping only as much as the body needs, so I guess I needed it! I felt great when I woke up, and that continued all day. I ate well, hydrated properly, watched an old Hawaii Ironman tape for motivation, and set off just after 3:30pm.

My legs felt amazing, and I shot out of the door like a rocket. After a minute or two I looked down at my Garmin and I was running better than 7-mins/mile. Wow, I thought, record time, here I come!

Half-a-mile later, it dawned on me that I was meant to be doing a five-mile run.

A 7:20 mile later, and my legs felt pretty much fried.

What a daft thing to do. As I said on here recently, one thing I really haven’t mastered yet is pacing. When I feel good, I just go. That really isn’t going to work for me in the long term. While it’s important to me that I continue to get faster, I really need and want to build up my overall mileage, and I simply won’t be able to do that if I try and make every single run a personal best.

A couple of miles in, and I knew that I didn’t have the legs for five miles. I needed to revise, and figured that because I’d gone so far, so fast already, I had a good chance at breaking my four-mile record. I was lucky enough to pass another runner just before my turnaround, and he (unknowingly) ended up pacing me for most of the way back. He was running around 7:45 or so and was probably a hundred yards ahead of me when this all started. I actually passed him around the 3.25-mile point, but I had to go around 7:25 to do so. He disappeared after that. I’m not sure whether he stopped or took some other route.

Anyway, I ended up doing a 30:51 for the four-miles, almost a minute off of my previous best, so it worked out well in the end. But as said I need to get my mind set on worrying less about speed, and more about distance. I need to be going out around 7:50, not 7:20, and trying to hold the former as long as I can. Tomorrow it’s my first long run of the week - at least six miles, I’m hoping - and I need to maintain an 8-minute pace.

Splits and chart:

What’s that? The big announcement? That’s coming up in the next post, anytime now…

If you enjoyed this article, please sign up to my free RSS feed. You can also receive updates via email. And if you really enjoyed it, please submit it to your favourite social bookmarking sites. Thanks!