Wednesday was my big day, this week. It was a packed schedule, in addition to the morning bike ride, and by the time I biked myself to the pool for 5:15, I felt pretty sluggish. My muscles were sore and tired. I ended up swimming about 2300 metres, but let's just say the sprint drills were more like "sprint" drills. After swim lessons, I biked to a family birthday party and let loose: had a few drinks, went out afterward with my husband, stayed out late, felt like I was on holiday. I love that feeling of reward after a lot of hard work.
Yesterday, I took the whole day off. I'd considered running in the evening, but stayed home over the supper hour instead. I'm already missing three suppers a week due to swim lessons and yoga. Instead, I decided to get up early-ish this morning and go for a long run. I went about 15.5 km, and ran for an hour and a half. The time was actually my goal rather than the distance (which I only calculated after the fact). I ran nice and slow. I had to remind myself at first what the purpose of the run was, but it was pretty nice to run at an easy pace. I went to the nearby park so I could run in grass. It felt pretty safe. I don't like running by myself in isolated areas, but it wasn't too terribly early, and there were people around. Lots of "good mornings." I ran a loop, which admittedly got a bit boring, but it did the job. Lots of hills. The grass was wet and my feet were soaked by the end.
By my calculations, my pace was a little better than 6 minutes a kilometre. I'd hoped to be at about 5 and a half minutes per kilometre, but was focussing more on not pushing it and going slowly rather than aiming for that time. Especially because I didn't have the distance all calculated out in advance (the disadvantage of going to the park to loop around rather than looping around the neighbourhood, where I know exactly how far I'm going ... but I think running on grass is more important than timing my distances, at least for now).
Small goal: to get signed up for a fall marathon and start working deliberately toward it, figuring out week by week exactly how to pace my long runs in advance of the race.
What I'm doing right now: my plan is to do one long run each week, lengthening the time that I run by 10 minutes each week, which will naturally lengthen the distances too. Up to, I don't know how long ... it's a lot of time to put in. I suspect I'm more of a 10km runner, but I would like to complete a marathon. Once.
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Oh yes! The reason I did the long run today is so I'll be free to do a long bike ride on Sunday morning with my friend Nath! She's planning for us to go about 55km!
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