05 April 2009

new training PR

After 2 weeks of not running, I decided my legs and ankles had a long enough break and I finally ran again tonight.

It really helps to rest one's body thoroughly. My muscles (or whatever was physically hurting) had time to heal, and I also had more time to do other stuff--like backing up my mac files, finishing a book, editing a short video for a colleague's retirement party, watching some DVDs, running errands, and, heck, even seeing the new Fast & Furious movie.

Of course, in terms of work, I also had to attend to two important direct mail campaigns that are going out this month, as well as help out in our team's latest fundraising event, the Beautiful Children Concert. (Hooray for this last one, because it was so well-attended, and Gary V. was great as usual, and hopefully we raised lots of money.)

So all in all, the 2 weeks were busy for me.

Although I was feeling a little blah tonight, I was thinking, what the heck, I'll run. Just 3K to re-condition my body. And to ensure that I would be able to correctly log my run tonight, I adjusted my watch's distance calibration to align it with that of Condura Run (which had a fairly accurate distance, according to Garmin-sporting runners who were in that event themselves). In a previous post, I had mentioned that my watch was incorrectly calibrated all this time; I've been running more than what was logged in my Timex Ironman. I should have ensured that I calibrated it properly before. My watch was logging, say for example, 5K in previous runs--and I was actually running 6.3K! Jesus.

So for tonight's training run in Legaspi Park, I made sure to compute and calibrate correctly. The first 2 kilometers were a breeze, and it felt really, really good to run again. I was running amazingly faster than usual, I wasn't feeling tired or sore, and because I was in such high spirits, I decided to go for 5K instead of 3K.

Somewhere in the 2.5K mark, I only noticed that there were two guys running behind me. In between songs playing on my iPod, I could hear them slightly huffing and puffing, keeping to a steady pace. Proud idiot that I was, I didn't want to give way and let them overtake me. So I kept to my pace, which I could feel was better than ever but left me slightly out of breath. Now I totally understand what my friend meant about not wanting to stop or go slower than the men in her running group because she didn't want to give them an excuse to think, "Ah, babae lang kasi." To hell with that, right? =) I didn't want to slow down and allow them to overtake me, and I'm sure the guys who were literally two steps behind me felt pressured to keep up.

So there they were, practically breathing down my neck, and it took all of my pride and sheer will power not to slow down. And then "Stealing Fat" by The Dust Brothers started playing on my iPod, and I knew at that moment I could outdistance them. There's a great part on this track with a very high BPM, and it has actually helped in making me speed up for a good 3 minutes. Not kidding.

Basically, I did speed up and left them behind somewhere. =)

And the best part is, I have a new training personal record (PR)! I finished 5K in 30:23 (or a pace of 6:08 min/km). Hooray!

This time, no incorrect calibration. This was the real thing. Of course, I could sense that I ran harder tonight than the usual because my "running muscles" were well-rested. So that helped a lot, in my opinion. And the fact that there were two men "pressuring" me from behind helped improve my run tonight. Hahaha!

Will see my progress in the next couple of training runs. I tend to get really sore in the ankle area; the soreness slows down my pace and makes my run suffer in general. So I'll have to take that into consideration. But for as long as I can keep to a 6 to 6.5-minute pacing without injuring myself, I have a lot to be grateful for.

2 comments:

  1. Steffi5:20 PM

    HAHAHA i'd be creeped out if those two guys were running right behind ME, you know.

    anyway, are there any other runs soon? i want to do something...productive. O_O

    ReplyDelete
  2. let's run this Holy Week! training run lang.

    ReplyDelete