The PBs just keep coming

It’s been a good day for me today.

I went to the park after a light breakfast of oats and then went running. The weather was cool and there was a slight breeze. My intention was to run and not pay too much attention to lap times, but of course it was going to be unavoidable to sneak glances at my watch to see how I was doing. First lap in 5:00. Second and third laps in 4:45-ish. I wondered if my stopwatch was wrong, but it was fine. The thing is though, I felt comfortable, unlike a few weeks ago when I would definitely feel the effects of a lap run under 5:00. I just carried on running; aiming more to feel relaxed and comfortable than to attempt to cover ground quickly. The long and short of it is that I managed to hold on to this pace with little difficulty. I chalked up a 10K time of 46:45, which is much better than my previous one of 49:54 set about a year ago.

When you’re enjoying the running it’s hard to stop. I carried on running, setting lap targets for myself. Let’s see how much distance I can cover in an hour. Can I maintain the pace for the next lap? Can I walk for a bit, pace myself under 6 minutes but still feel relaxed? The lap times got slower and slower of course, but the mental battle was really in the last two rounds. By that time I was aiming to cover a half-marathon distance, and was reduced to alternately walking and running – more walking than running, I’m afraid, as the last two laps were 7:00-ish and 8:00-ish.

Still, I did the remaining distance in 60:33, so I can happily claim a half marathon time of 1:47:28. Brilliant for a getting-back-to-shape TryAthlete, I think! That beats my time of 2:20 set last year as well by quite a lot.

I was quite cold when I finished though – I think the last of the oats had long vaporized during those two laps before the end. I can understand why elite marathon runners get towels to keep warm when they finish. I had to sit down for a while to regain a wee bit more of my senses and when I got home I was so cold, tired and hungry, I wolfed two big bowls of cereal down – milk dribbling down my chin, that’s how bad it was.

There’s no school today so I’m going to spend the rest of the day catching up on household chores and all that, so we can have more of the weekend together. The steam fair has come to the park (the trailers are all there and set up already), and Kate is eyeing those donuts – we’ll probably make trips out to get them in between sets of Wimbledon finals, like we did last year.

Lessons learnt from my run today? In the past a half-marathon under two hours would have been unthinkable for me, even though I could go under 11K in an hour. Today I just kept going, digging deep, trying to find the willpower to keep encouraging myself to plod along, not to give in to the temptation to stop and give up. There was no one to say “well done” or “keep going” or flash a thumbs up for encouragement. Just me, myself and countless laps around a 3/4 mile loop. Whatever possesses a person to keep going in these circumstances? What can a person draw on in this sort of situation?

Self-belief. Willpower.

I'm glad I had the chance to test myself today, and I'm glad I found it within myself to keep moving, to keep placing one foot ahead of the other.

(If this all sounds a bit convoluted, then it’s probably me suffering some after-run effects.)