Giddy as a School Girl

After eight days, my running hiatus is finally over.  I completed a three mile run Monday and so far my shin feels good.  Now it’s back to some serious running.

Most of my training has consisted of simply putting in the miles with a few hills thrown in for variety.  I have really been slacking off when it comes to speed work.

Thanks to WVR, tonight I have a real speed workout planned, on a real track, under the supervision of a real coach. I’m as giddy as a school girl.  I’ll probably faint like one too, as it will likely still be near 90 degrees when we begin.

Wish me luck.

Getting Faster

I just thought I would share this graph of my average 5k pace over the past few months.

It represents training runs of 3-5 miles. Each point is the average pace over several runs during that week. I had to convert the times to a decimal to trick excel to display the graph right, for example 9.50 = 9:30 minutes/mile.

I have quickened my pace from an average of about 9:40 to 8:15 in just a few weeks, without doing a single speed workout. This is purely the result of running with the West Volusia Runners since the beginning of the month. I just pushed myself a little to try to hang with some of the faster runners and found that I was able to keep up.

The group holds a weekly speed workout featuring 400 or 800 meter intervals that has been on hiatus this month. I’m excited to see how much I will improve after running a few of those workouts.