I have returned. You didn’t know it but I was away for a couple of days. Amber and I went to London to visit her mom. I like Amber’s mom, and Lyle her partner (the politically correct term I suppose, boyfriend would be more common but sounds weird to me when applied to my wife’s mother’s male non-husband counterpart) and her Grandpa. Anyways we were visiting and to get to London from here is about a four hour drive. I don’t know about you but a long car ride murders my back. By about the half way point I am squirming uncomfortably and with still about and hour to go I am searching for relief of any kind.
So, there we are at Am’s mom’s house and before we left Amber went on google maps and mapped out a route that was 1Km around the circle street that the house is on. Great I thought because doing a bit of running is a good way to keep my fitness routine in place without any real extraneous work. I packed shorts and shoes and a shirt, done, ready to go.
Thursday morning, my back still hurting a bit, I ran and it just so turns out that while the route may appear mainly flat by car, it is actually about 75% uphill! It also turns out that this route is five laps of a 1.07Km loop. So here I am running, and then sprinting for the finish because I want to have an acceptable time for 5K and it turns out that (I just figured this out as I am typing this) that I am not running 5K on this route but 5.35K, further than the 5.2K route I have been previously doing at home, and mostly uphill at that!
So there I am thinking that I am getting slower, pinning the cause on my sore-ish back and the mostly uphill thing and just sort of brushing off the result . It was not a bad time 23:14. Indeed last summer that would have been one of my top times for 5.2K!
Today I am home, and after another long car ride yesterday and a 4 hour 7K walk around the zoo and playing goal last night, I did not feel too much like exercise today. But by 2 o’clock I just couldn’t sit inside anymore and went and ran around the block by my house five times. I did this as I had previously measured the block in my car and I knew it was ‘just’ over 1K. I set a time of 23:18. Again not bad, but slower than I thought because I knew this route was about as flat as I am ever going to get. Well just over 1K was even further than the route in London. 1.09K to be more precise and so I ran 5.45K today instead of the intended 5K.
So what does it all mean? It means this. My last two runs were actually my fastest outdoor runs yet. While my clever attempts to find an exact 5K route (without backtracking) around my house continue to elude me I am getting the exact type of results I want from all that running at the gym on the treadmill.
These are only outdoor runs, the treadmill ones are recorded separately as they are achieved in a completely different environment. Also these are only the times for running outdoors this year.
*Of note I think is that if I take that pace of 4:14/Km and apply it to 5K, I would have done 5K in 21:11, the same as my best time on the treadmill! Yay!
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