Building up the miles

Including the St David's day Run, I have already run 12miles this week - that's almost a half marathon...tho' eventually I'll have to put all that together at once!

I finally dug out my Garmin Forerunner watch...

Interesting to run with GPS - nice to know exactly how far you have run rather than rely on plotting routes beforehand and noting landmarks that signify the mile markers. It also means that you know your running pace at all times. The temptation of course is to spend your run with your eyes glued to the pace display, something I was keen not to do. Yet what I found amazing was how little difference there is in perception of pace between 9 and 11 minute miles. That makes it hard to judge my pace, and either run too fast and burn out (common in race conditions and something I did a few years ago on my only10K race) or to let your pace drift slower and slower. Hopefully I will get better at judging pace, and with the Garmin to keep me in check I should be okay.

I plan to go out with the Garmin soon and practice upping my pace in a controlled manner (say 200m 'sprints')

Tuesday I ran a 4mile street run (cabin fever from looking after a chickenpox'd monkey1 spilt over and I had to get out of the house at the first opportunity. Legs felt like lead after my race and long walk on Sunday.

Today I did a 5mile river run - what I call the "4 bridges" along the Taff Trail. That was better, and I enjoyed the distraction of both the Garmin and an audio book I purchased off the internet (Kathy Reichs' Grave Secrets in case you are interested!) - but WOW it was windy. I knew this, but went out for a run anyway as I had mum over to look after Monkey1 and Monkey2 and it was an opportunity for a midweek daytime run. Miles 4 and 5 were straight into gale force wind. Very hard and slow going. Still clocked my furthest distance yet, and only walked to decend a flight of steps from one of the bridges.

Uploaded my runs to the computer. I have some great software for this (Accuroute) but I've misplaced the disk and password so it might be a while before I can use this. So reliant on the far from perfect "Garmin Training Center". Not at all impressed with the basic interface which allows you to do very little. However, the ability to view your routes in Google Earth is great.

Garmin Training Center Pace v Distance

The inability to scale the Garmin pace graph is truly pathetic, though you can scroll crosshairs over the trace to view your pace at specific points.

So, what next? Consolodate my 5mile distance, and start properly attempting to increase my pace. To this end I have been reading my running book. More on this in my next post. :o)