Double negative

Two runs tonight, sort of. It’s a Tuesday, so that meant Cullybackey Cosy Sofa and, on this occasion, a run back home.

This was week five of the club Couch to 5k programme in the village of Cullybackey, and since it was a consolidation week it meant a repeat of last week’s 3-8-3-8 splits. It’s great to see the numbers coming out being maintained although, admittedly tonight was a much nicer evening than last Tuesday!

I slotted in with Stephen’s group tonight and enjoyed a comfortable run around 3km of the village although he did seem to go out of his way to find every single climb in the place! Not necessarily a bad thing because you can never run up too many hills, it’s all good training.

After that, because it was such a pleasant evening, I decided to run the four miles or so back home.

I wanted to put my recent heart rate training to the test but, very quickly, it turned into something else. I started off slowly, trying to stay within range of zone 3 and was a little frustrated with my time after the first kilometre, so I decided to up the pace just a bit … and when the second kilometre came in quicker and within range I wondered if I could negative split the whole run.

Reasoning with myself that this could be quite a useful exercise I upped the tempo a little more for km3 and, again, it was faster … and so it continued. Four was faster than three, five faster than four and so on. Indeed, the differences were getting greater the longer I ran, by the end I was chipping ten seconds off each one and the surprising thing was my heart rate didn’t increase by much.

Quite honestly, for me, this was an amazing run. I didn’t walk to bring my heart rate down, I just slowed my run and then gradually increased my speed again. According to my Garmin I came in at Aerobic 3.8 which was within the range I was aiming for.

It was a very measured and calculated run which took a bit of focus to maintain, but I guess it’s evidence that I’m perhaps becoming a more intelligent runner.

Oh, and an added little bonus? I wore my new trainers and barely experienced any issues with them!!! Hopefully, the 10k covered tonight means I’ve finally broken them in.

Relive my run (Cullybackey Cosy Sofa)
Relive my run (Run home from Cullybackey)