Today was a real test for me, but I passed with flying colors. The test: to be able to get up and run before getting to work at 8. I woke up at 5:55 (luckily with no alarm), got dressed in my running gear and scarfed a nutrigrain bar and a banana with a swig of water, and was out the door by 6:05. It was nice and cool, which I think allowed me to perform quite a bit better than I had in the past 2 weeks or so.
Today (details) was a brief 5-6 min warmup, followed by a 5k at tempo pace, followed by a 7-8 minute cooldown. It went very well, and I was able to run 8:20 pace at about the same effort level as I had been able to run 8:40 pace about 3 weeks ago. I'm starting to get excited, because now I have my base mileage built up and am able to work on speed for the first time in my life. I think I'm going to look for a 5k in the next couple weeks, just to see where I'm at. My run today had a time of 26:21 for the 5k portion, and I was tired but not exhausted at the end. Also, the route is quite hilly, so on a flatter course I'm starting to think I could probably do under 24:00, which would make me extremely happy. In fact I'm going to look for races immediately following this post :).
One thing I noticed is that my HR was off in the first couple minutes. Sometimes the strap doesn't get a very good reading while dry, so there are some unusual peaks in the early going where it says my HR was 160+ and it was more realistically below 135. Once I get a sweat going (or I wet the underside), it's very accurate.
Off to look for some races!
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