"Speed"

Image nicked from here

I have a week of annual leave from my job at the Sexual Health Clinic. I have some course work to do and some reading for tomorrow but I have all day to do it so I thought I'd get the day started with a run. I had a notion that I wanted to go up to the Meadows and do some kind of speed session, however lame, so I figured out how to get the Garmin to time me to run "hard" for 3 minutes and recover for 2. Times 5. The science behind this was that I felt I could face 5 X 3 minutes efforts. Because of my sore ribs (which are getting a lot better), I can't wear my heart rate monitor, and I think this is probably a good thing. So I was gauging "hard" by feel.

I wasn't sure what the Garmin would show me during an interval - and as it turned out all it showed me was the time counting down, so I had no clue as to my pace either.

It was a beautiful sunny, icy day. A good day for it. I haven't pushed hard in some time and it felt pretty awful. I had forgotten how to do it. Breathe and don't think. It felt better in the last 2 or 3 efforts but then as I discovered later, I'd slowed down for them and that was probably why.

When I'd finished I had a look at the numbers - they were pretty bad - I'm not telling you how bad - but then I now remember all the times I thought I was running badly and in retrospect I now think I was running pretty well. So if my running future is not just to be a repetitive sequence of me thinking I'm doing badly only to find out later that things can get worse, I think I have to take a radically different attitude. So all I'm saying about today is that I ran pretty well!

Tiny little Nicola Duncan was flying round the Meadows in her pink shorts while I was out there. She didn't see me, but with our speed differential, she probably mistook me for a tree.