Still Boppin’ Through the Wild Blue

Old Faithful

I wrote in my last post that I was cranking up my couch to 5K routine again. Slightly to my surprise, I’ve completed two 5k runs in the last three days – this morning’s was a 6k.

I’ll be resting my legs for a few days now for family reasons, but this morning’s 6k tells me a few things, one of which is that 6k is probably about my present limit and therefore a benchmark. The other things it tells me are,

• the muscle memory is there from last year and my swimming has kept up cardio and general fitness levels over winter and spring.
• so long as I’m sensible, patient and don’t do anything stupid, 10k fitness is achievable by autumn (sooner, probably, but it depends on whether the summer gets really hot again.)
• even though I felt towards the end that I was slogging, in fact my watch says that I jogged every kilometre in exactly 7 minutes (except the first where I had to wait for traffic to cross a road).
• I used my old running soundtrack on an original iPod shuffle (pictured), and at the 3km mark – a bridge next to Murrayfield Stadium – I was slower than young me by a whole Immigrant Song. It used to begin when I reached that bridge, this morning it was just finishing as I got there. I’m OK with that – my legs are older. However I do recall that 15 years ago I was doing intensity sessions in the gym at work, so I think part of my routine now will include sessions of running a measured distance, say 500m or 1km, harder than I would normally jog, then rest and repeat.
• if I can get to 10k fitness later this year, then it becomes feasible to start the work needed to build that out to a half-marathon in 2024.

Wait – what? Yes, another attempt at a half marathon is in my mind for next year. The last one, in 2009, was an odd occasion – I completed the run in 2 hrs 08 min then fainted and ended up being checked out in hospital. That was when my blood pressure issues were uncovered. To run one again means my training has to recognise that I’m 14 years older, but I’m also 13 kilos (28.6lbs) lighter than I was then, believe it or not. My pace in 2009 was around 6 minutes per kilometre, so my 7 minute pace this morning isn’t too bad for an auld yin.

Don’t go getting excited. There’s a long way between now and then and the reality is that injuries can happen however sensible you are, and they take longer to heal now than they did in the past. Nonetheless, it’s a plan.