A Personal Best, Doing a Justin and a Treadmill

As regular readers (hello you!) will know, I am currently on a quest to get faster over 10k. Recently this has meant that I am running shorter, faster distances. A 7.2k Sunday run at a tempo pace resulted in an unexpected bonus –  I got a 5k PB! I knocked 35 seconds off my previous PB, if you don’t mind. I was astounded how well the speed training has helped and at one point during the run had to slow myself down so as not to over do it. Imagine such a thing?

I know my 5k time is not going to allow me to qualify for the Olympics anytime soon, but its not too shabby for a tall, heavy 44 year old and did I mention I knocked 35 seconds off?

I was delighted with myself and how did I celebrate? That’s right, by doing absolutely no running for a week. Its what I like to call, ‘Doing a Justin’, named in honour of my virtual American mate Justin from beardhairinmycoffee, who recently decided that its is fine to train for a half marathon by running just once a week as long as that one run is a good one. I am not totally convinced of his qualifications for this radical new training method.

To be truthful, it wasn’t a choice, life and mostly work got in the way combined by the shockingly early dark evenings we now have as a result of the clocks going back 1 hour here for Daylight Savings Time – does this happen anywhere else but the UK and Ireland? I live in a small rural town and we have a grand total of 4km of street lighting. I suppose this means that I can run in town if I really need to but then everyone will be looking at me, and by that I mean the entire population of the town.

As I write this it is blowing a gale outside. The weather here in Ireland has taken a decided turn for the worst and as I live in the west, we get the full force of the Atlantic’s fury before it settles down and drizzles on the rest of the country. As a result, I did something today I have not done in years, ran on a treadmill. I really wanted to run but was not sure going outside was a great idea as there are lots of bits of trees falling off and flying around. I also didn’t fancy the headwind.

So I went to the local community gym and hopped on the treadmill. I set it at a 1% gradient to pretend I was on the road and did 7.2km at my prescribed pace. I had to walk at 2km and 5km to wipe the pouring sweat off my face which was a new experience but all, in all, it was not so bad. It may be a useful last resort for very bad days – does anyone have any tips to make it as close as possible to running on the road?

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