Well, today is more of a success than even Friday was. I did get all 25 min of running done. I’ll admit that it is still more of a jog than a run, but for now the important part for me is to get the duration up. The distance will come soon enough.
I changed things up a bit today, in that I decided that there was no real reason for me to drive to my running course. My walk in was a bit longer than 5 min, and I started the audio for the walk a bit later than I would have liked, as I would like to have started the run just about the time I got on the trail, rather than about 2 min later. I did start my GPS track when I got to the trail.The first 11 track points appear to be from walking, as do the final 4 or 5. Apparently there is a spot on the path where GPS readings are a bit suspect. While there is a hill on the path, the variation in the altitude for this rout really is only about 30 to 40 feet, and almost all of that is at the north end of the route I took today. So when you look at the track around the lower right hand portion of the path, and see me running at over 40 miles per hours, 80 feet under water, I would advise treating those readings with a bit of suspicion. (If I can find a way to discard such readings in the future, I probably will.)
I mentioned elsewhere that I really hate hills. I guess that at some level I can’t get away from them. I suppose I could move to a location with miles and miles of nothing but flat ground, but since I don’t live there, and I expect that I will have to run on hills for some of the 5k events in the future, I’ll just have to live with them.
In any case as I mentioned there is a small hill on the north end of this run. I would be surprised if the height over the rest of the route were more than 25 feet or so, but it is there, and aproaching it from the south, I was more than happy that I was hitting it before my midpoint. It did feel better running back down it to the south than it did going up it to the north, but I was just as happy I hadn’t decided to go much further than that hill to the north.
I wasn’t exactly sure where my second turn around point should be. However I figured that if I went past the parking lot, that I would be fairly close to 25 min by the time I got back to where I got on the path. In fact it worked out fairly well, and left me with a route off the path that made my walk home a bit shorter.
The feeling of completing that 25 min of running, hearing the tones indicating that 25 min is done, was wonderful. I had done what I set out to do, and I felt good. Oh, I don’t know that I could have run another 5 min quite yet, but we shall see on Tuesday. No matter what, I consider this a successfull completion for Week 7.
