Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Run Thirty-seven: 4 miles an hour!

Not great on the whole -- but 4 miles an hour! 
For reasons that sound lame even to me, I was on the treadmill rather than the road tonight. What is in my head is "I didn't want to deal with the gravity out on the road", but of course they even keep the gravity on at the gym. It feels different though -- maybe it's the hills. Anyway, I guess it just boiled down to I wanted to go to the gym today. So I did.

My goal for the run, if I was at the gym, was to see if I could do 4.0 mph. The answer is: YES! :D I did five whole minutes at 4.0, at the end of my run. It felt *really* good too!!

It was interesting, because the 3.6 mph I started out at didn't really feel all that great -- my calves were getting crampy and it felt like I was plodding. I walked for a bit in the middle, doing my best to keep at 3.5 mph while walking, then went back to running at 3.7 before I finished the last five minutes at 4.0. And those five minutes felt really good!

Question for the experienced runners: Does it make sense that going a little faster feels better as far as flow and gait and just how comfortable it was? It almost feels like I'm using more energy when I run slower.

Next time I'm on the treadmill, I want to experiment with that -- how long can I go at 4.0 mph and does it continue to feel good for more than five minutes? (And if so, for how long?)

Next run is scheduled for Saturday. The weather is going to be intermittently rainy and we've got errands to run, so whether or not I'm at the gym or on the road depends on whether it's raining at the moment when it's a good time for me to run. Goal for the run, if I'm on the road: Run farther and faster. :D  Goal for the run, if I'm on the treadmill: It's more of a program than a goal, really, but what I want to do is work my way up to running at 4.0 mph over a couple of minutes (after my five minutes of warmup) then go that fast for as long as I can. After that I'll play it by ear.

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