A Long, Lazy Road to Fitness

My blogs are getting more sparse by the week, it seems. At first it was a lack of time, and then it was a lack of progress. I couldn't find time to run my last week of school, and pretty much spent the entire time gorging on terrible, fatty foods. Now I am paying the price. I went for three runs so far this week (I will hopefully do some sort of long run tomorrow), and I struggled to find the motivation to do more than my usual bare minimum. A body at rest tends to stay at rest, I suppose.

I did manage a halfway decent run yesterday, however. I planned a quick jog around the Irving Nature Park (6.5k), and decided upon arrival to attempt to throw some speed work in to make it interesting. I started out relatively slowly, thinking I would pick it up around two kilometers in, but then changed my mind and just started running harder than I normally would. Perhaps it was my lack of activity for the last couple of weeks, or the fact that I wasn't running very fast to begin with, but I wanted to push myself and see how my body would respond.

My body didn't respond, at first. My first kilometer wasn't much faster than my normal pace, and my second kilometer was only slightly faster than that. By three k I was moving pretty fast, and was starting to approach my planned marathon pace. If I could match that pace for the entire run, I figured, I wouldn't be doing half bad. Of course, that meant I would have to make up for the pedestrian pace of my first two k, but I was up for the challenge.

The fourth kilometer was right on target. I started to fade on the fifth kilometer, but tried to keep it together, knowing that I didn't have much further to run. I pushed hard for the last mile, sprinting down the last hill, only missing my goal by seconds. It's not quite marathon distance, but it'll do in a pinch.

Tomorrow I will attempt a long run, and if all goes well I will also blog about it. Hopefully Easter dinner doesn't derail my plans.