Matt Gets Running

See­ing my friend Bert’s tweet ear­lier on got me think­ing. I have gen­er­ally been going for endurance rather than speed, espe­cially recently.

Also in my mind was my friend Bananza’s advice that “if it’s easy, you’re not work­ing hard enough”.

So, tonight I I mixed things up a bit. I fig­ured it’d do me good to push myself a bit harder. And it’d give me some idea of pace, and how it feels to go a bit faster.

As it turned out, it feels like hard work. Although good hard work, rather than bad hard work, like that crap run I had a cou­ple of weeks ago.

But I cer­tainly wouldn’t want to push myself to keep up a sub-6:30 pace with every run, because I was really flag­ging at the end, and it was heavy-breathing tough work for most of the way through.

I man­aged it, though, keep­ing up a pace well below my nor­mal 7+ min­utes per kilo­me­tre for the whole 5K. As you can see from the Run­K­eeper stats, I actu­ally came a lot closer to 6 minutes/km, fin­ish­ing the 5K in just under 31 minutes.

So, that’s my fastest 5K ever. It was very reward­ing, but I was a lot wob­blier on my legs than nor­mal when it was fin­ished, and I think I was near the limit of my endurance at that speed.

Hum­bling to think that there are run­ners out there who can do 10K in that time and con­sider it a bad day… But I’m happy with what I’ve man­aged so far!