Fitting one in

I struggled to get out of bed Friday morning when the alarm went off so I rolled over hit the snoozze button and went back to sleep. Laurence was no help at all telling me that I needed the rest and that I shouldn't go out. She's a bit of a devil actually, tempting me to take it easy, and the sad thing is that I listen to her and then feel all guilty afterwards.

It was a good thing then that I left work early on Friday evening and told Laurence that I'd go for a run when I got home to compensate. It was still early evening when I got abck so I put on my running kit and headed out along the usual route. I'd been planning an interval session in my head to put in a bit of quality but running after work by yourself is hard to get motivated and the 3 x 2km that I'd been planning took the back seat.

Despite this breather I allowed myself, having run the first couple of kilometres at a fairly brisk pace for the start (about 4:20 / km), I decided to push it a little and to turn the run into a tempo session. It may have been early evening but it was already dark and I couldn't see my splits as they flashed up every kilometre. I did notice that I ran around the roundabout, or just over 4 km, in 17:10 so I thought that I wasn't far outside my best time for this course when I went through this point in 16:45. This encouraged me so I started to push it harder from here and really worked my stride and felt my quads stretching. I started to really fly in the park as I chased a runner down the path and then noticed that I went through 10km in around 41:00 so the minute I'd lost at 4 km (compared to a 15 km/h pace), I'd pulled back some of this.

I was beginning to tire but the watch kept me going, knowing that I wouldn't be far off my training PB for this route. I was still running my kilometres under 4:00 and looking at the Garmin afterwards, I ran the last 850 metres at 3:35 pace. I finished the loop in 51:40, beating my personal best by 10 seconds in the process. Chuffed to bits and this helped ease my conscience about not doing the early morning run.

12.8km in 51:40 or an average pace of 4:02 according to the Garmin.