Rob's Running Blog

5 miles in 49:08 – Season’s Best!

Had meant to run on Sunday but events took over! And was out till very late yesterday, so the post Easter Tuesday was the day to get back to some running!

Wanted to do 5 miles, but had no target in mind, just wanted to see how I felt and run accordingly. Set off and felt a bit tentative at first, but started to subtly pick up pace, even though the first km went by in a pretty slow 6:30 and the Garmin seemed to tick over a lot later than usual on a my regular starting route. Felt that my body was responding and decided to take a slightly hilly route, with a big downhill but some uphills to compensate for the easy ride! The next KM’s started to tick over quicker, with 6:04 and 6:09, and the pace was thereabouts, with just a little slowing during the hills.

As I was getting towards the business end of the run I could see that I was possibly going to be able to achieve a sub 50 5 miles, something I’ve only done once before this season, and I had to be careful not to get carried away and sprint, ever mindful of the calf, but I did pick up the pace and with 3k to go it was well on the cards. I felt really good, breathing hard but not struggling at all, and I did the penultimate km in under 6 minutes, which meant I had about 6.5 minutes to do the last km! As much as I eased off the gas a little, figuring sub 50 would be good enough at this point, at one stage it looked like I would hit sub 49 so I had a stretch of running pretty fast without sprinting, and then eased off the gas as it looked like I would make 8km easy – of course too late I realised I needed another 50 metres to make up the full 5 miles, but it was too late so I just coasted to a stop at 49:08 having done the last km in 5:40 – despite the tough hills and easing off at times for fear of going too hard too soon in my recovery, I finished with a season’s best 49:08, so am pretty much where I was before the calf injury, if not better, and if I can keep my progress steady, I can start to think about maintaining that kind of finishing pace for longer, and look forward to perhaps beating last year’s time in the Great Manchester Run 2012!