8 mile

My mileage on Sunday reached the 8 mile mark and I am still feeling pretty good about it. I must say that I didn’t really feel like getting out there this weekend. Laziness and video games had an adhesion that threatened to keep me in the house and the rain certainly didn’t help. Yeah – it was actually rainy and cold here in San Diego this weekend and after the heat we had a couple weeks ago, it felt a lot worse that it was.

It was also windy. 20 mph winds with gusts up to 30 mph were not fun to fight while running. I actually had to turn my headphones up because the wind was too loud to hear my audiobook.

Looking at the actual weather online, it was around 60-65 degrees with 15-25 mph winds, by far the most ‘wintery’ day we’ve had for running in San Diego.

The temperature was great for running but with the rain and wind, I wore a long sleeve shirt to stay a bit warmer. I didn’t get cold but I had sweat pants ready if I needed to run back to may car. Actually, I broke my run down into 2 parts this week so I could stop at the car if I needed to. The first segment was a 1.5 mile outbound run that let me gauge how things were and if I needed to do anything to deal with the weather, I could stop back at the car by mile 3. The second segment covered the rest of the 5 miles – 2.5 out and back.

I kept things to my regular pace right around 13:30. Still a bit faster than recommended by the Run-Walk method and my Miracle Mile, but I think this fits where I’m currently comfortable. As you can see, I’m also sticking with the Run-Walk-Run method.

This week I increased my ratio from 45–30 to 60 seconds running to 30 seconds walking. I still felt pretty good at the end of the run – though wet and cold.

As far as my Heart Rate, I pretty much stayed in the zone I wanted to be at, similar to last week, though I was a little bit higher, I think because of the wind.

On the whole, I think I had a very successful run. I didn’t hurt myself, I felt like I could have kept going, and I was fine afterwards. Recovery didn’t seem to take much, though my Garmin said it would take 35 hours for a full recovery – less than what I’ve seen recently.

And I think that’s one of the best parts of the Run-Walk-Run method. I’m less likely to get injured using the technique and I can still increase the distance I run.