The mind is a funny place.
I didn’t really feel like running today. I even thought of taking the day off. But I got dressed, went out and progressed through this chain of thought:
- I’m kind of tired, maybe I won’t run today
- Maybe I’ll run the river trail–in and out in about one hour
- OK, I’ll walk to the end of the river trail (about 2K) then start my run
- All right, I’ll run at the lake, but I’ll do a short loop, where I run 2.5 km, then turn around and retrace my route back, avoiding the extra 5 km of walking around the rest of the lake
- Well, looks like I’m running a 5K around the lake and doing the full walk back!
And I actually felt pretty good, most notably due to it being 18C instead of 32C like it was on Monday. I decided to start at a moderate pace, then judge how I felt after the first km, and go from there. But something weird happened. When the first km dinged on the watch, I looked and saw my pace was 6:43/km. This is not just slow, it’s extremely slow, like “barely running” slow, and I am sure my pace was better than that. I also noted that the total time so far in the run was over seven minutes, which should not have been possible unless I was RUNNING THROUGH TIME. My BPM was fine, so I picked up the pace and blasted to the finish line with a pace of 5:46/km for the final km. This brought my average pace to a reasonable 6:10/km.
Still, I am pretty confident that first km was off by a good 30 seconds or so.
Despite the weirdness, I otherwise felt fine and my overall BPM was basically the same as on Monday, despite having a much better pace. I am feeling some soreness (not pain) in my upper thighs from all the running, but suspect that the muscles will adapt soon™. If they don’t, I’ll begin to ease off on the extra walking and stick more to just the 5K part.
Stats:
Run 686 Average pace: 6:10/km Location: Burnaby Lake (CCW) Start: 12:05 p.m. Distance: 5:03 km Time: 31:00 Weather: Cloudy Temp: 18ºC Humidity: 55% Wind: light BPM: 147 Weight: 168.6 Total distance to date: 5033 km Devices: Apple Watch Series 5, iPhone 12, AirPods (3rd generation) Shoes: Brooks Caldera 5 (148 km)
