Week 3 - Saturday

Take it easy

I don’t remember the last time I felt as tired as I did this morning. Woke up early enough to feed the cat, as usual, but instead of happily stay awake until it was time to go out I went back to sleep, and it was an enormous struggle to drag myself out of bed at 0815.

Saturday: 6km easy

Runna never¹ wants me to do easy runs on a Saturday, so I am frequently swapping workouts around. Not sure why. They even have FAQs about “how do I incorporate Parkrun?” and it says, well, do it as part of your easy run. Yet you can’t say “I am a Parkrun participant, so take that into account”. Meh, no great hardship.

For the first time in so, so long, today I didn’t warm up. I mean I walked at a moderate pace to the start, which is about 2km from the house, but I didn’t run it. I was listening to the latest episode of The Running Channel podcast, entitled “Do you need to do interval running?” - hoping that the answer would be “yes” ‘cos otherwise why on earth is Runna making me do them? Spoiler alert: the answer was actually “absolutely yes”. The podcast is sponsored by Runna, mind you, so …

Bumped into Roger en route to the start, no sign of Nick who I have been tending to run with recently. But I told Roger about my training plan and that today was to be at conversational pace, and he hung back with me all the way round.

I doubt I could’ve gone faster if I tried. Felt so incredibly sluggish today. The torrential rain overnight had done a real number on the conditions underfoot, Broadwater really is unpleasant when muddy. It had largely stopped raining during the run, and the wind wasn’t so bad.

Turns out I accidentally did a progressive 5km. Didn’t feel that way, but it’s what Strava says:

Here it is on smashrun, and Strava.

Finished just over 30 minutes, measured at 5.1km, so about 5:57/km. Had a bit of a rest while getting scanned and saying my goodbyes, then knocked off the last 0.9km and that’s week “3” completed. As glad as I am to be doing Parkrun deliberately slowly, it’s playing havoc with my graphs - for years, I’ve treated Parkrun as a weekly time trial to see how fast I am, i.e. I’ve mostly gone as fast as I felt able on the day. Not now!

Got home and noticed my legs were covered in mud. I hadn’t even slipped over! Bleurgh.

Week 4 is a “deload” week which, the podcast said, will be where my body somehow uses the opportunity to solidify whatever gains I made in the past 2. I don’t understand it but hey, I’m trusting the plan.