Matt Gets Running

When I got home from work, the humidity-switched extractor fan in the bath­room was still run­ning from this morn­ing. It nor­mally switches off after five minutes.

It’s that kind of day: hot and humid. But I was ready for a run anyway.

Today was the first day of week three, where the walk/run pat­tern kicks up another notch on the Couch to 5K pro­gram. Today would be two short runs and two long runs, with the longer runs being three minutes.

It doesn’t sound like a lot, three minutes, but it was cer­tainly stretch­ing my lim­its. Even on the first three-minute run, I was will­ing myself on at the end and pant­ing a fair bit.

I took things easier for the third run, an inter­me­di­ate, shorter one. I was helped by a slower run­ner over­tak­ing me dur­ing the walk­ing recov­ery — when the time came to start run­ning again, I kept her in sight and tried not to catch up. (Luck­ily I was far enough behind that it prob­ably didn’t feel to her like she had a strange, pant­ing stalker )

And that seemed to leave me with enough puff for the final three minutes, even though thirty seconds of it were on the uphill ped­es­trian ramp up to the fly­over I have to run over to get back to civilisation!

So, suc­cess­ful, and I feel stretched to my limit again. So I guess my limit is gradu­ally increas­ing, which is the whole point… Cool.

Or not that cool, in fact, as I def­in­itely needed a shower when I got in. What happened to all that nice cool­ing rain, eh?

Any­way. I must fig­ure out what’s caus­ing my lower back/upper back­side (top of the glute? Not sure) to ache towards the end of the three minutes, only on the left-hand side. I may be a bit out of bal­ance. Def­in­itely some­thing to keep an eye on, and I’ll maybe go through it with my Alex­an­der Tech­nique teacher on Friday.

In other news, the iPod Genius-generated playl­ists are get­ting repet­it­ive, so I’m try­ing out Potion Factory’s Tan­ger­ine, which can ana­lyse your iTunes lib­rary, determ­ine the BPM count/beat strength of the tracks, and gen­er­ate playl­ists with vari­ous options, like one that starts off slow and builds up to tunes with a faster beat. I’ll report back once I’ve had a play!