Monday, November 26, 2012

Butterflies Make Me Run Faster

Good news!  The butterflies do make me run faster!  I found an amazon credit we had and ordered the butterfly compression stockings.  They came today and I had my best run yet.

I also realized it's much easier to run if nothing is hurting.  The tops of my feet had been hurting for a while.  About a week ago, the pain was quite bad when running.  I came home, googled a bit, and found some stretches to try.  It seems to have helped (or maybe taking 3 days off) and I had a mostly pain-free run.

I am realizing that when I watch the time and push myself to run for a set time, I do better.  Someone had mentioned a run four minutes/walk one pace.  I decided to try it and it seems to be a great system for me for now.  I tried this for the first time on my Thanksgiving run (which I didn't have time to blog about).  It worked fairly well until I got too hot (I made the mistake of going mid-day on a very warm day).  I ended up walking most of the last mile, when my song of "four more minutes in the hot, hot sun...three more minutes in the hot, hot sun...two more minutes in the hot, hot sun..." stopped motivating me.

Tonight the 4/1 minute pace worked really well.  My app graphs my pace.  My graphs are slowly going from looking like this:

to this:


The blue line is my pace.  The green is elevation.  I'm getting more consistant and taking fewer walking breaks (the spikes).  The two big peaks are from stopping to stretch out my leg.  

It's not easy or fun, but I'm doing it.

Stats:

Distance: 3 miles
Duration: 36:39 min:sec
Average Pace: 12:13 min/mile
Average Speed: 4.91 mph
Total Miles: 47 miles

Thanksgiving Stats:

Distance: 3 miles
Duration: 38:45 min:sec
Average Pace: 12:55 min/mile
Average Speed: 4.64 mph




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