I bit the bullet on Saturday morning and headed for Shanganagh Park; instead of doing a loop in my neighborhood for a time trial a parkrun it was. I have avoided these up to now because I didn't want to race every week but I guess I wanted some company for the fast bit, and I tried to get myself into non-race mode so that I wouldn't quite run myself into the ground.
In fact, my preparation was nit exactly ideal, with a family breakfast coming first (family breakfasts are so rare I really didn't want to miss out), and I really felt that food in my stomach when jogging towards the park. In fact, I was afraid it was going to come back up when running at higher effort but seemingly the five minutes break between me arriving at the park an the start of the parkrun was exactly what I needed to get the stomach settled.
Once it started I managed to keep a lid on my effort, and it wasn't quite race effort. In case your wondering why I was insisting so much about not putting in a race effort, I don't want to get overtrained again and I tend to sharpen very quickly when doing fast workouts, so I want to limit this. At the same time I feel a few faster runs are important, especially with me having lost what little speed I ever had in the last few years, which is why I have been doing those time trials in the first place.
Anyway, I managed to run at about 95% of race effort until the last k when the effort started to creep up and the last 4, 5 minutes were definitely at race effort. That would explain why the last mile was faster than the second one, which would normally be highly unusual in a 5k, at least for me.
I had expected to finish somewhere between 21 and 22 minutes, and in the end I was exactly at 21:00 on the spot, so just about remained within expectations. It was my slowest ever run in that particular park but that will undoubtedly be broken again many times in years to come.
On Sunday I was just about to head out when the heavens opened and I just could not get myself out of the door, so I stepped on the treadmill instead. I have an excuse, apart from being old and soft that is, as it was Cian's birthday and I didn't want to be out of the house when it was time for his presents, but reality is I really didn't fancy a run in those miserable conditions and an hour on the treadmill it was, basically binning my long run this week (which you really are not supposed to do, I know).
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