Oooh, look, fancy 3D map.
My official parkrun time was 37:10, with an average pace of 11:58/mi. That, in itself, is very cool. I think I can whittle my pace down to under 11 minutes by the end of the year. I walked a lot during this run, especially in the second half. Ate too much for breakfast, I think, so my stomach was being a little sloshy. Plus I had to tie my shoe at one point. But also, my heart rate was threshold practically the entire time, so I stopped purposely a few times to get it down below 160. Clearly I can tolerate a 170-180 bpm for 3 miles (my average was around 165), but it’s a reminder that I need to do more slow runs. I’m sure if I ran slower overall I would’ve gotten a faster time. It’s nice to see a 9:30/mi pace but clearly I can’t sustain it.
In fact, comparing this run to my track run on Thursday, where I ran 2 miles and all but 30 seconds of it was running and I’m basically proving my point, as my average pace for that run was 11:32 but was a consistent 11-11:30/mi pace, rather than the serious ups and downs of this parkrun. To be fair! the parkrun course does have a couple of uphills, which the track does not.
For some reason WordPress won’t let me caption these image, so I’ll do it here: the top is my pace for the track session, the bottom is today’s parkrun. You can see how, for parkrun, when I was running I was generally running much quicker than I usually do (again, because I was keeping pace with other people). But it really does tire me out.
The message overall is good: run slower and you’ll run faster.
My first parkrun time was 42:58. So, over the course of four months my 5k time has gone down by a little under 6 minutes. If that’s not progress I don’t know what the fuck is.
That’s my pace for parkrun #1. Look at all those troughs of walking, whereas now they’re more like spikes.
Next week I am running a race. I’ve got a lot of races lined up but will have more parkruns in between them. So … see you then.
