Monday, September 23, 2013

Couch to 10k: Week 11, session 1

71 min. Run 40 minutes. Walk 1 minute. Run 20 minutes.  Run done on 22nd September 2013.


Oh my gods this felt AWFUL.  So awful I decided I hated running and if I wasn't asking for sponsorship I'd give it all up now.

Blah.

I'm not going to give it up don't worry.

So what went wrong?
I had to keep stopping to cross roads, either waiting for a gap in the traffic or for the lights to turn.  This broke up my ryhythm and made me feel like I was walking or standing around for ages.
I fell over.  I was running on a grass verge and rather comically went splat straight forward onto my front.  I did not get hurt, just was a bit sore.
I wasn't familiar with the route I was doing and that always makes things feel harder.  Plus the road I was on seemed to go on forever and ever and ever.
At the 30 minute mark I had to stop and walk for a couple of minutes because it was too damn hard.
The one minute walk between the 40 minute round and the 20 minute round turned into a 2 minute walk.
On the 20 minute stretch I was running through town and pedestrians were getting in the way so I ahd to slow down and walk.
It just felt really, really hard.

I didn't even attempt Gas Hill again.  Running up that just wasn't going to happen today.

But then when I finished I looked at my endomondo app and I'd run (more of less) for 6.2 miles... which is 10k... I could have sworn I'd only done 5 or 5.5 miles...  Let me explain about how I record my running..:

I go out with two devices on me. One is my casio wristwatch.  I use the stopwatch in it to time when to run and when to walk.  So when I leave the house I start the 5 minute warm up walk and at the 5 minute mark I start running.  For today's session, I would then keep running until 45 minutes, then I would walk for 1 minute, then I would run until the stopwatch says 66 minutes.  Then I do the cool down walk for a further 5 minutes.
When I have to stop to cross roads I stop the stopwatch and start it again when I'm over and am able to run again.  If I have to have a walking break in the middle of a running round I stop the stopwatch whilst I walk and start it again when I run.  This means that no matter the amount of roads I cross, pauses I take or walking breaks I do, I know that run for the full amount of time in the the programme.  So today I ran for 60 minutes.

The second device that I use is the Endomondo app on my phone.  I start this either as soon as I leave the house, and stop it when I get home, or (like today) I start it after the warm up when I start running and stop it when I stop running, before the cool down.

So today I can see that although I was running for 60 minutes, I was out for 1 hour 10 minutes and I did 6.2 miles.  I estimate that with the falling over and hanging around waiting to cross roads, I was standing still for about 5 minutes so was walking for about 5 minutes.  According to the training plan I should have been walking for just one minute.  So OK, I didn;'t run for 6.2 miles, but I was covered that distance and I was running for the vast majority of that time.  This makes me feel a lot better.  The run may have felt awful, but I did what I needed to do.

The app says my average speed was 5.29 mph.  Now, when I was at the gym last week the treadmill was set at between 8km/hour and 9km/hour.  Sadly the treadmill doesn't show miles.. Now 9km/hour equates to 5.59miles/hour.  As I was running today it felt like I was going really slowly, much slower than I was on the treadmill.  I only really felt like I was doing a decent pace in the full 5 minutes before I fell over.  After that it felt really slow.  So I am very surprised by endomondo's average speed.  I must ahve been going faster than 5.29miles/hour when running, because the average has to incorporate the walking parts.

I guess this is a lesson that although I may feel awful about a run I may actually be doing OK on it.

Money raised:
£189.  That's £36 that I have personally donated and £153 from friends, family and anonymous sponsors.  Reclamation of gift aid has raised another £38.25, bringing the total to £225.25.
My target is £200 (without gift aid)  Please help me get there by donating on this website!

All money goes to the Abortion Support Network (ASN), who provide funds to Irish women needing to travel to England for an abortion.

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