I recently wrote about how I suddenly noticed a big boost in my speed. The speed I've noticed improve, though, is my comfortable pace. I'm a fan of distance running because I love the comfortable pace...just running along, feeling good but not pushing too hard. While that's all fine and dandy for long distance races, it's not helping me any for 5Ks. This summer is going to be full of 5Ks so I've decided it's time to get my butt in gear and learn how to run fast.
For today's run I wanted to do three 1-mile repeats, with a .25 mile warm up and a .25 mile recovery walk/jog between each repeat. When I do repeats like this, I generally do laps around my cul de sac because it's relatively flat compared to the rest of my neighborhood. I did my nice little warm up at an 11:00 pace, and then I beasted out a whole mile in 8:40. Lesson learned: I CAN RUN FAST.
However, at the end of that mile I wanted to fall over. I did my .25 mile recovery walk...and then walked some more. I knew doing that two more times would kill me, so I opted to just do an easy 1.5 mile run to get to an even 3 miles for the day. The nice part was that my mind and body obviously had gotten into a rhythm with the fast running and I maintained very close to a 10:00 pace for the rest of the run. I was hurting, though...legs were aching, had minor side stitches. But overall I really enjoyed it and I'm actually blown away by the fact that I can run an 8:40 mile! Now if I could only maintain that pace for a whole 5K...something to work towards!
After my run I headed to yoga for a Long Slow Deep class. This was class 5 out of 15 this month. I'm doing great with my month of commitment! This week's focus was hip openers, which I love, but my hips are really feeling it! It was a great practice and I'm making a lot of progress towards letting go of my fears. I've tried to focus on living life this month and enjoying myself, drinking wine when I want and doing tons of yoga. My body feels so good!
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