web-goddess

Now we’re talkin’! I feel like I’ve got my running mojo back a little bit. I wanted to add in a fourth day of running per week, but I didn’t want to kill myself with the distance. So I cut back the length of my 2nd run and added in a short 3rd run as well. Now I’ll be able to slowly increase the length of those two. As for my LSR (Long Slow Run) on the weekend – I was dreading it. The plan called for 12.5 miles, which is 20km. That’s fully 50% longer than the City 2 Surf I did two weeks ago. (Of course, for the C2S I also counted the long hike we did from Bondi to Bondi Junction, which made it a fair bit longer.) The distance was surprisingly easy though, and it definitely gave my weekly mileage a nice boost.

Week 7 distance: 17mi (27.2km)
Week 8 distance: 12.25mi (19.6km)
Week 9 distance: 21.65mi (34.7km)That’s a 27% increase on two weeks ago. Which sounds bad, but going by the “increase no more than 10% per week” rule, I only overshot by a mile. (And that’s probably because of the extra short run I did during the week.) I feel pretty good. I’ve got some “delayed onset muscle soreness” from the long run yesterday, but that’s to be expected. I did a 4:1 run-walk ratio throughout the whole thing. I ran from my house to Centennial Park and then did three loops around the walking track (which is just over two miles per loop). It was a warm day, so I made sure to hit the water fountains at every opportunity. I also tried out some new energy gels at the one-hour and two-hour marks. I was still a couple km’s short when I got back to the house, so I ran around the block until I hit 19.5kms. Then I walked the rest of the way home to cool-down. I was really surprised to note that, even with the walk breaks, I was on track to finish the half-marathon only a minute or two slower than I did in the actual race last May. Maybe I should seriously consider using the walk/run method in the Melbourne half…

Really, this is all to say that I’ve had a bit of a realization about my training. I think I was sort of assuming that by doing all this running, I’d naturally get faster. But I’m not, really. My pace has been hovering around the same mark for some time now. What I am noticing is how much farther I can go before I start to feel really horrible, and how quickly I’m able to recover afterwards. The last time I did a really long training run, I was battling a stitch in my side and an acid stomach the whole way. Not this time. (In fact, running actually got rid of the headache I’d gotten that morning!) I was tired at the end of it, but in a normal post-workout sort of way. I haven’t injured myself, and I don’t think I’ll have any trouble doing my normal weekly run on Tuesday. So while I’m not breaking any land speed records, I’m really happy with how my running has progressed over these eight months. I don’t know why it took me so many years to realize that slow and steady really is the way to go.