I signed up for a half-marathon in about 7 weeks so I figured I would get out there and train for it a little bit and in the process of doing so I have learned a few things about myself as well as the technology that I used in the past.
My Strava goes back a lot of years and much like other apps, it on occasion will remind me of how "fast" i was years ago. I never really bothered to look into it because i just kind of took the thing at its word. But diving into the information on my good runs revealed that there was often GPS glitches that would sometimes make my 1km pace extremely fast, sometimes under 1 minute. Can anyone on earth run that fast? (looking it up) Nope. The world record for a 1km run is 2 minutes 11 seconds set by Noah Ngeny of Kenya in 1999.
Strava really should flag and eliminate these anomalies because now I basically can't use any of the information I have from both and old phone and from when my Garmin was on the fritz during its final days.
Anyway, now I have an almost brand new Xiaomi 2 and I have been digging into the results after the fact and have found out it is rather accurate or barring that, if it is wrong at least it is wrong only slightly and in a consistent way kind of like a scale that is 1kg off will always be 1kg off so you don't get the wrong idea.
Before we dig into the numbers I want to say that I overheat easily. This has always been the case with me even when I was a 7-day-a-week star athlete in high school. I have always sweat a ton and being in that state makes me very uncomfortable. Therefore, maintaining a good pace in the summer isn't just a question of muscular or cardio endurance, it is a question of me actually being concerned about my body temp.
Anyway, here is the progress i have seen in just 3 weeks of consistent, 4-time-per-week running in preparation for the half-marathon
Im not really sure what I was going for here but I guess I got
to 5km and wasn't home yet. This is not a great pace and I knew it wasn't but I was just happy that I didn't stop. I had a good baseline to work on though so from that point forward I just wanted to do a 5k under 8minutes per km.
This is about a week later. I was fairly comfortable at this pace even though I was completely saturated with sweat by the end of it. Looking around at other people running I could see that I was considerably more sweaty than others and perhaps this is a medical condition.
This was yesterday and I mostly took it easy although I will say that having the watch that measures your time and distance is a good and a bad thing because as I get closer to the 5k mark I start watching my watch intently and that last 400 meters or so seems longer than the rest of it. I should probably stop looking at my arm so much haha
This is the one I am most proud of and it is from 2 nights ago. A buddy of mine that is also participating in the half-marathon has never been a runner and he was making fantastic strides and improvements in overall speed and consistently. As he was rapidly getting nearer and nearer to my own pace I took it as a challenge so after he bragged to me that he was close to my 5k pace and he had run 8k, I took that personally.
Therefore I was convinced I was going to annihilate his pace on this run and did so by a full minute.
Make no mistake, this was VERY taxing on me and I was spent at the end of it. This is a lot faster than I can maintain and certainly have no notion of being able to do it for a full half-marathon.... but I did it, only barely, breaking the 7 minutes per km pace for that sort of distance.
The question now is how to improve my overall pace over much longer runs. The half marathon is roughly 25 kms and I have only once ever attempted something that distance and didn't track how fast I was during that event either.
I have found that a lot of what is going on in my runs is mental because I am not fatigued, I just know that walking is a lot less hot and taxing than jogging is, but, just like I proved in my 8km run that beat my buddy's time by a full minute per km, I know that I am capable of it, it is just a mental block.
I think that for me the next step is going to be to consistently and with relative ease to be able to run 5k and 7:30 per km.
If you have been training for a lot longer than me and are aware of an effective way to train for longer distances, I would like to know what the methods are. In the meantime, I am just quite happy to see that I am seeing some improvement.