The Need for Speed

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 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!