I was somewhat tired during the day because I had gotten just about 4 hours of sleep last night. A power nap and an espresso sorted me out for the rest of the day. When it came down to run, I decided that I needed to run a bit longer and further than previously, which I did.
Throughout this run, after I passed the 3km mark, I kept repeating that “pain was an illusion” and “abstraction” to distance myself from some of the muscle pains that I was feeling. Initially, I felt pretty good. Good enough that I didn’t many breaks. I took only two and they were short, walking breaks, with my arms up to prevent stitches. For the 4.14km run, my pace was 7:14, which is the best since I started training. My guess is that this is normal, since I’ve almost cut out all of the breaks, which slow down my pace. Heart rate was 157 bpm, with a max of 179 bpm. It took me 29:53 to run 4.14km.
It’s funny how my heart rate chart is straightening out. Before, it was all jagged lines, now it’s slowly becoming a constant line. There are still some peaks, but they are less abrupt. Basically, I went out for the same amount of time as Tuesday, but covered an extra kilometer in that time. I don’t want to walk Spike more than 2km per night. He can’t handle it and that’s fine to warm me up, but it takes away a bit of my run. This is the best that I’ve run all year, although I haven’t run much in 2011. In fact, it beats most of my average paces for 2010, ever since I got the Garmin Edge 500. I think I have to go back to 2009 to find a pace that is at this level. My fastest pace was about 5 min/km and I was at that level in November 2008 on an 8km run in Quebec. I found a 13.8km training run that I did in 69:49, which is a pace of 4.55 min /km.
I still have a way to go to regain my fitness level of 2008, but I also need to be careful with injuries. That’s what got me off running in November of that year.
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Running
weekly km count: 15.74
monthly km count: 30.49
yearly km count: 52.59
Cycling
weekly km count: 0
monthly km count: 0
yearly km count: 19.88
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