Week Three - Five Miles!

Last night was the beginning of week three of my training program and our group run. This week we were scheduled to do 5 miles. I have never run five miles in my entire life. Never even wanted to – until now. For some strange reason I wasn’t worried about completing the run anymore. When I finished the four miles last week something clicked into my mind that if I could do this I can do anything – with the right training :)


Luckily when I got there they had divided the slow group into 2 sections. Last week I just about killed myself with the pace and was blown by the last mile. The faster 15 started out with 2-1s (run 2 min/walk 1 min) while the slower group did 1-1s. According to Galloway’s method for my pace I am supposed to do even smaller intervals so I was a little concerned about keeping up, but luckily one of the trainers started a small group of us out in 30-30s.

Now you would think that doing such smaller intervals would have really slowed us down, but for the first mile we were within a few hundred feet of us. It was probably about 2.5 miles before they got completely out of sight, but they still only finished a few minutes ahead of us. But doing the 30-30s was so much easier. Well not easy – it was still hard, but I didn’t feel like I wanted to puke after so I consider it much better.

The best part of the run – I didn’t finish last! Only because the other runners with me took a bathroom break, but still it was nice not to finish last for once.

Here are a couple snapshots of my run – from a numbers point of view. The first is my stats from runkeeper.com. I logged every mile in around 16:30 – except the last, but I forgot to turn it off right away. The second is my calorie burn for the day. The long high peak is the run of course. You can see that I did 80 minutes of vigorous activity (I have defined at >4.8 mets). That is almost my entire run. Even though I am walking during part of the run, the way it happens (frequent but short) allows my burn to stay steady.