Running fast...

Thursday, September 15, 2011

What would a week be without at least one trip to Dan’s with another car issue? The Honda ‘check engine’ diagnostic light flashed on and so I knew I’d be heading out to see him after work…effectively making a long bike ride impossible. Once there, he quickly determined it to be nothing and when I mentioned it was cold and didn’t want to ride anyway he couldn’t help but comment. “You getting soft already? It’s only 50 degrees.” Of course he hadn’t bought his riding shoes yet and wasn’t riding at all…easy for him to say. But yes…I was getting soft quickly. It happens every fall when temperatures start dropping. No big deal, but the first time its cooler and especially the first ten minutes until I’ve warmed up really tend to suck. No matter…I didn’t have time to ride, so I headed for the park for my weekly run.

Now…this is perfect running weather. I decided to run the course I follow for the Survival Workout because it tends to be less muddy and with the rains we’ve been getting, it seemed like a good choice. I ran a course that takes me about 33 minutes on a good day but since I haven’t run it since losing all the weight, I was challenged to push it. I have a split a little less than a mile which I reached in less than 7 minutes and would normally reach closer to 8. It felt so easy that I decided to pick it up. I don’t really have any other check points on the course since I run it so seldom, so as I was approaching the final mile I decided to run what I believed to be sub-7 pace. I finished in 30 minutes…a full 3 minutes faster than usual on what I figured to be about 4.5 miles. I was curious about the pace I was running and decided to stop up at the Mayfield Track on my trip home and time myself on the quarter at the pace I’d been running. I hit the track jogging, but quickly accelerated to the pace I felt I’d been running in the park and after completing a quarter mile and checking my stop watch, confirmed I’d been running a 7-minute mile pace.

It’s been a long time since I’ve raced the roads…20 years in fact. Finding that I am again running sub-7 mile pace for 4-5 miles without much difficulty on 4 miles of running a week has me thinking about racing again. The problem of course is the knee. I could continue to train as I have been and do a 5K road race now and again, but without doing a lot of training, I don’t think I’d be happy with the outcomes. I suspect I could run under 20 minutes for that distance, which would be competitive in my age group, but I know I would be frustrated by not being able to do the training to run faster. Maybe I’ll get that operation and then maybe I’ll race again. Maybe.

Run workout: 35 minutes.
Training Heart Rate: 150 bpm.
Calories burned during workout: 550.