Keep on running

Day:        33

Distance: 9.92km

Time:       49:56 secs

Calories:  790

It's Friday night. People up and down the country have finished work for the week and are going out to spend their hard earned money in pubs, clubs and restaurants but, like an over-played song by the Spencer Davis Group, I just keep on running. January will soon be seguing seamlessly into February and the end of my self-imposed Lent, so this won't be the case for much longer. Soon I'm going to have to get creative and think of how to fit marathon training around going out. Or, maybe it's the other way round, I'm not sure yet.

The plan called for a 50 minute run tonight with the added twist of demanding I do this by running for 10 minutes at a 'steady' tempo and then upping the pace to run for 15 minutes at 'tempo' before repeating the sequence. That means that 30 out of the 50 minutes, or to put it another way 60%, of this run was done at 'tempo'. Now, I'm never too sure whether there's much difference between the different paces when I do them. To quote a Nirvana lyric, "my will is good" and I find myself speeding up after 10 minutes and slowing down after 25 minutes, but I also catch myself slowing down in the intervening period. 

For tonight's run I followed a broadly similar route to the one that Jim and I took on Wednesday. Due to the varied pace of the run I figured that it would make sense to add a bit on, so I extended it at the beginning and at the end to create a new route.

By the wonders of Run Keeper I can see that there was a real difference in my running speeds; the first 2 kilometres took around 5:30 minutes each to run, while the next three took around 4:30 minutes each (this pattern was repeated for the remainder of the run). Another indicator of the effort that I put in tonight is that I I ran 1.2km further than on Wednesday and did so in less time.

After that run it should be no surprise that I returned home a sweaty mess. Well, it wouldn't be to most people, but my wife was surprised enough to ask whether it was raining out when she let me into the flat.