Rob's Running Blog

5k Tempo Run – 27:39

With the City of Salford 10k less than 2 weeks away, my plan is to do a small taper, and cut back on mileage while still doing some speed workouts, so by the time I get to race day, the base miles will be doing me good but not still in my legs, and my body will be used to going out of the blocks quickly!

Had to have 3 days off as after the long run at the weekend I was still getting the intermittent sharp pains in my left leg. My theory is it might be some residual referred pain from my back from when I fell, and may have a bit of a pinched nerve back there, or it could be any number of things, but rest seemed to benefit it!

I set off gingerly at first, but there was no immediate reaction from my leg, and after a very short warmup of slowish running, I started to pick th pace up bit by bit, testing my legs out. There was a bit of a calf twinge before 1k was up, but nothing major and it didn’t recur. I clocked the first km in just over 6 minutes, and then I was hitting 5:15 pace and quicker for most of the rest of the run. I was breathing hard and noticed the Garmin going under 5 mins per km at times, even though I wasn’t going flat out (comfortably hard, but not race pace). I struggled a bit on the last km, and the last few 100 metres was uphill, which slowed me down but I managed 5:37 for the last km when I felt I had slowed to a crawl.

Am not sure on this evidence I could get near running 10 sub 5 minute kms, but you never know on race day, I will do a few more fast runs to keep my legs ticking over and see what happens! There was no recurrance of the sharp wobbly pain in my legs, my right ankle felt mildly niggly, but OK, so not sure what it was all about really!