I have worked out why it has rained every day since last Friday! It’s because on Friday morning I ordered some running shorts (some Ronhill trail shorts if you’re particularly interested) in a desperate attempt to find coolness (alas, trendiness will never be mine) through the summer scorchy months, and thus it will no longer be sunny or indeed quite as hot. They turned up yesterday, so it’s done pretty much nothing except rain for the last two days since they’ve dropped through the letterbox!
P’s been on day shift again today, so in the interests of not ending the month on a COMPLETE exercise flop as I have been somewhat slack this month, (machine shut tomorrow so will probably not get anything extra done and Thursday and Friday are anyone’s guess!), I went for a run before picking him up. It’s been a bit cooler anyway, and was on and off showering, so I have yet to taunt the weather with my new shorts, and so decided I would be A-OK in my capris and a t-shirt. This of course meant that I was still a little on the warm side as I hadn’t taken into account the lack of wind that there always is by the river. One day I will learn, and on that day it will be blowing a gale right down the path and I will freeze.
I mentioned last week I was getting a bit bored of doing the same old routes and wanted to shake things up a bit and roam in new exciting directions, so today I went the same place I’ve been going for over a year now…nothing like a hypocrite 😉 Last week in the interests of adding a bit of variety, instead of heading for one place I did a time-trial type thing, turning around when I hit 12 minutes and then heading back again and seeing how far I’d made it when I got back. I did the same thing today, and as usual set off at my too-fast pace which I always do for the first few minutes. This time I pushed myself to keep it up until I was feeling a bit uncomfortable and then a little further, but not to the point where I couldn’t continue jogging afterwards – I kept up this ‘run’ pace for 1.2km before dropping down a bit before dropping down to a jog, but even this felt quicker than my usual distance eating one – I kept it up knowing I wasn’t going to be going death-inducing distances.
Looking at the pace graph, either my watch was patchy through the trees, or I’m really bad at telling a steady pace…up and down like a yoyo! And once I’d had returned back down from what turns out to be a speed peak, my ‘jog’ pace was actually not far off the ‘run’ pace I started with. Next time I want to feel like I’ve ‘run’ for 1.5km instead of 1.2km but it’s anyone’s guess what my feeling like I’ve run actually means!
I ended up doing exactly the same distance as last time – which is weird because I did it quicker, so how I’ve managed to turn around on a fixed time point and finish in a shorter time and still do the same distance is a bit baffling to me – this wasn’t a fixed distance run! So, last Monday it took me 24:32 to do the 3.94km, and today it took 23:56 🙂 My pace went from 06:13 to 06:04 min/km and apparently I burnt off a whole extra 14 calories! Go me I guess! That’s gotta be worth at least one pudding 😉 A new best pace anyway 🙂 I’m hoping if I keep working on getting quicker over the shorter distances, I’ll be closer to getting under 1 hour on a 10km – though obviously my 5km pace will likely be quicker than my 10km one 🙂 One day I shall get there…one day…
Blue Runnings 
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