As if signing up to a race of 5k, a distance I knew I could actually run, wasn’t daft enough, I’ve signed up to do two 10k races later in the year. The last 10k race I ran was years ago – long before the pandemic. Still, at least I’ve got longer than a couple of weeks to get my training in.
Each of these events has different race lengths available. For one, Colin and some of my running friends are also doing the 10k race. For the other, there’s an ultra available, which Colin is going to do. I’ll stick to my 10k, thanks!
Training plan
I have a training plan, which I’ve saved to my watch, from a running magazine on the internet. I’ve done week 1, day 1 so far, which was a warm-up of two miles of easy running, followed by four intervals of alternating fast and recovery running, finishing with two miles of easy running to cool down.
I used heart rate (HR) zones as targets, so fast was HR zone 4, and the warm-up, cool-down and recovery runs were HR zone 2. I used HR zones so I didn’t have to work out what sort of pace I thought would work, but I found it very difficult to keep to HR zone 2 because it required me to run far slower than I normally do; perhaps it would have suited a brisk walking pace instead. It was particularly tricky during the recovery runs because it doesn’t allow for the time taken for the HR to reduce after exertion.
I need to determine suitable paces after all, which is exactly what I was trying to avoid!
