Grooved to Run

Today was Week 4 Day 1 of the Couch-to-5K running plan.

This week’s plan consists of a 5 minute warm-up walk, followed by two intervals of jog 3 minutes, walk 90 seconds, jog 5 minutes, walk 2.5 minutes. As usual I’m including a 5 minute (or longer) cool-down walk as recommended by the Ullrey’s Podcast for Running.

It was cold, foggy/misty, and about 29 degrees when I left the house. It snowed a little bit last night, just enough to make the sidewalks rather treacherous. So I was forced to slow down my pace a little bit to make sure that I didn’t slip. I’d rather go slower and be safe, than try to go faster and twist an ankle… and end up out of commission for a long time.

Today’s total was 2.85 miles in 35:22 (12:25 pace). My warm-up was 0.33 miles in 4:38 (14:07 pace). The total for the intervals was 1.97 miles in 21:25 (10:53 pace), followed by a cool-down of 0.55 miles in 9:19 (16:55 pace).

My goal up to this point had been to keep all of my running intervals at a 9:39 pace or faster. But today, based on both the weather and difficulty of today’s workout, I made the decision to slow my running intervals down to about 9-10 minutes per mile. I’m OK with that, and think it’s the right thing to do. I felt fine after the workout, and I’m sure speed will come with time. I still have about 95 days of training to go before the Rocket Run 5K.

Having to deal with January weather isn’t making this any easier, but with some luck I’ll be doing W4D2 on Wednesday.