I have a jogging program where I go out and hit the bricks, as they say, at least 3 times a week. I am not trying to break any land-speed records when I do this, nor am I overly concerned about my form and other such things. What I am concerned about is maintaining a certain pace and doing it over a long period of time.
The fastest I have been in recent years was around 6 minutes per kilometer, but this proved to be too taxing on me for me to maintain for any prolonged period of time. I can do it for 3 km or so, but then I start to feel the pain and my heart rate is way too high.
When I go out now my only real objective is to not stop running but also to not start out too fast and then taper off. This was a real problem for me when I first started doing this on a regular basis, but I feel as though I have a pretty good grasp on it these days.
There are two things about this particular run that make me happy. One, my heart rate never entered the VO2 Max portion which is normally represented by a red color which means I am doing a sustainable pace and two, that I was able to maintain a relatively equal pace during the entire run except for that one time that I had to stop because i needed to cross the street to continue the running path.
At the moment I feel like I can manage to maintain this pace for a relatively long period of time and for me at least, the secret has been to not try to be a hero at the start of it. My watch is not good quality enough for it to give me accurate speed every second, but it does a pretty good job of telling me once per km how well I am doing.
I feel as though I know my own legs well enough at this point to maintain a pace within a certain parameter.
I didn't post about it, but not long ago I had a strange something or other happen with one of my calves and a run I went on may have made that problem worse. My time was also over 8 mins per km. Therefore, I am quite happy with this consistency over 7km even though it isn't particularly fast.
With running they say that a huge milestone for longer distance runners is being able to cross over that hump of a 30 minute 5k run. I am still a ways off from that but I am happy with the consistency. I wouldn't say that I am making too much progress, but that is only because I have abandoned the 5k benchmark. I aspire to be able to go much further than that and to run at a consistent speed where I don't feel that my breath, my heart rate, or most importantly, my legs, are getting into a bad state.
In this particular run I only stopped because I didn't bring water with me like a fool, and was very thirsty.
Hopefully I will not forget the next time because honestly, that is not asking a great deal of a person to remember just a few things.
I dont know what it is about me but I get so hyper-focused on my phone, my watch, and my earbuds that I forget to bring something with me that is far more important than any of those... hydration.
I am going to take a break from running for the day because the last time I tried to run 2 days in a row it didn't work out very well for me the second day and it just kind of made me feel like it was a waste. My watch tells me to take breaks and since it reads data that I don't really even know how to interpret, I will give it the benefit of the doubt.
But that doesn't mean that today is lasagna and sofa day. I am going to hit the gym for a light weight session focusing on core exercises.
What did you do today?