... you just spent the last hour doing kickboxing at the gym and afterwards you think of going for an easy 3 miler to cool down.
OK, the thought occurred to me today after a good workout at the gym. I hadn't gone to this class held on Mondays and Wednesdays at the base gym since early March and this class felt easy. Of course the last class I attended was just a few weeks after I hurt my leg skiing and was just getting back into any kind of exercising. Today my endurance has greatly improved from all of the running I have done since then. The different track workouts and the long runs have been good for me. Last night was the track workout and we did 6x400s. The goal was to go about a second faster on each successive 400, with the premise that we don't dawdle on the first lap.
When i got to Ventura High I did my own warm up: one lap walking to get my joints loose, followed by an easy mile which I did at a 9:48 pace, faster than the mile pace during the long Saturday run. Still it felt easy to me. As a group we did 4x200s as a warm up and then we divided up into the intermediate/advanced group and the others - II can't really call the rest of us as slow any more as we are improving. And the group is also not me and Brandy any more. We actually had three more with us last night.
Off we went an the first lap I did was at a 1:55 pace. Pretty good I thought. After the easy lap in between my second lap was at 1:54. I was feeling confident that I could dial in the right tempo but with the help of my watch telling me how fast it was taking me to go each 100. Third lap was 1:53 followed by a 1:50. The fifth lap I covered in 1:53 and I did feel a little tired at the end. Maybe I started the lap a tad faster than I should have but made sure that I recovered during the easy lap in between. The sixth and last lap I knew that I could turn it on at the end to see how much faster I could go the entire lap, although I also knew that was not the point of the exercise. I covered the first 200 at 55 which meant a 1:50 lap, pretty good. But I was feeling good and I decided to turn it on. On the last 100 I was able to go for it all and surprised myself that I was still accelerating (or at least I thought I was still accelerating) at the end. I crossed the line at 1:39, a big improvement over the other lap times. The other runners were also able to go faster at the end. So I was happy for me and I was very happy for the others too. This is making me think that I can maybe do 8 minute laps for a 5K. Not any time soon but maybe by the end of the year?
As for the subject line, I saw that as a question on one of the forums on active.com. People were writing in stories of how they knew they were a runner. I have a few thoughts on the subject but I truly hope to keep coming up with more. It's only been about 9 months since I started any kind of running so I am still a relative newby in the sport. May I cntinue to enjoy it for many decades to come.
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