Early 30

Sometimes I surprise myself.

I went to bed last night with half a mind to going out for a run first thing in the morning. However, after a restless, uncomfortable night in large part due to the heat, a run was the last thing I wanted to do after getting up at 6am to feed the cat.

I also knew that if I didn’t go out I very possibly wouldn’t for the rest of the day so, kicking and screaming internally, I pulled on my shorts and out I went.

My runs so far this month have been disappointing timewise, but I know that’s because I’ve been following a C25K schedule and the walking breaks have been killing me.

This morning I decided just to run non-stop for half-an-hour to see where that took me, both in terms of route and time. I wanted to see what my pace was, although I still wasn’t going to push it. This was just running for 30 minutes without the walk breaks.

Whether it was because it was cooler (although it was still 17° at 6:30am), or because I changed my route slightly (bored!), or because I wanted to give this experiment a chance – or everything combined – but I was pleasantly surprised by the results.

Although still slower than I am when I’m fully fit I was pleased to clock the first mile in at 12:38, that was more or less what I guessed I was doing during C25K and in the four shorter runs I’d done last week but haven’t blogged about.

It was good to have kept going, but since I was following C25K all this month the big question was how my legs would react to keeping going into a second mile without the blessed relief of a walk break?

Pretty well, as it turned out! 20 seconds faster in fact. This was nothing short of brilliant! I had been slowing lately as my runs have gone on, but here I was finally bucking that trend and it felt fantastic!

Yes, it was only two miles and I’ve obviously gone further in the past, but to do it non-stop considering how little I’ve been running lately feels like a real breakthrough.

I could have gone on to bring it up to 5k but, at the same time, I was content with what I’d done. I didn’t want to risk disappointment by running out of steam, thus taking a bit of gloss off my efforts. I did round it up to 30 minutes which brought me up to almost 2.5 miles in total … and that last half-a-mile came in at 11:22 pace, faster again!!!!

But, as I said, I was very happy with my efforts this morning. It’s something to build on and, maybe, rather than push on now, I wanted to hold a little back for next time.

Onwards and upwards, and all that.