Good Golly Miss Molly

Please excuse the fact that we have a second update this week. Given that this is a little rambling interlude of my training and endeavours towards completing an Ironman I wanted to capture the feeling that I have following yesterday’s training session.

Monday evenings are club running sessions. I will admit that this is a new thing for me; the structure of a running session. Over the past 18 – 24 months I would simply pull on the trainers and, sometimes struggle and other times enthusiastically, grind out X number of kms in an effort to build endurance, fitness, ultimately lose weight and complete my next desired race.

The beauty of the coached running sessions is that we are guided in our efforts. We are pushed passed our comfort zones, encouraged by our coach and peers and even spurred on by a little friendly competition!

While we haven’t really gone for longer distances yet I have noticed a change in my running speeds for the past few runs.

Those two yellow boxes include the time trial and the interval session

What continues to amaze me, even as I type this, is the fact that firstly I am achieving these pace times (at all) and secondly (and I don’t want to jinx it) they are starting to feel “normal”. I use normal in a very broad sense. “Normal” in the way that at the BRICK running last weekend I was feeling it a little after the rides and thought about slowing down and when I looked at the pace on my watch I was in the 4:50 range, not in the 5:30 range that I anticipated. Unheard of!

As I mentioned, last night was run training. Cue collective groan as coach informed us that we had interval training! We had the usual 1km warm up and then we launched into laps. Each lap was approximately 350m long and we were told to go at a pace that was uncomfortable. I think from the below table I achieved just that!

 

I have NEVER seen a lap that had a 3:xx ever! I am so pleased. I know that it was a sprint and that it was not over a sustained longer distance but hey….it says that for 1 whole km I achieved a pace of 3:59!!

Next goal is to get out there and run a longer distance again and see what can be achieved at that level…I am even feeling the desire to get the trainers on for a longer run this weekend…yup, I am hooked again (time to go shoe shopping!).

Oh, and the fact that I am typing this means that I made it to work on my ride in this morning.

 

Next test….riding home!

Thanks for reading.