Progressing

I did a nice little progression run with Andrew last night. A week ago, he, Andy, Alex, and I had run the Hanging Rock loop in Salem plus a little add on to hit 10 miles in 1:08:30. With it being a hilly loop and considering where I am in the comeback process, I was pretty pleased with that. Well, last night we ran a version of the Hanging Rock loop again in almost the exact same time, but covered an additional half mile in the process. The first couple miles were around 7 min pace, followed by a couple right at 6:40. After that, it went 6:25, 6:10, 6:09, 6:06, and 5:47 for mile 9. We backed off after that, but still hit mile 10 in 6:41. Our time for 10 miles was 1:04:50, so sub-6:30 pace and almost 4 min faster than the week before. Good progress, and a nice little workout! With about 5 min to go, Andrew commented that it felt like the end of a bad race, to which I responded by saying that was exactly how it was supposed to feel. Can’t keep doing runs like that and not get fit.

Progression runs used to be a staple of mine but I’ve gotten away from them over the years. I plan on getting back to them going forward and I think it will be very beneficial, especially in races of 10k and up. I’m also glad to have Andrew in town now and very thankful to have a group to run with. It makes it much easier and everybody benefits and gets faster, which is the point of all this suffering – ha, ha.

Anyway, the week is going well so far and I’m probably more fit than I thought I would be at this point, even though that’s not saying much. I’m feeling good and believe I’m staying under control for the most part. Two of the next three days will be easy (thankfully!), with a tempo run sandwiched between them. I have a feeling that one’s gonna be ugly, but you do what you gotta do. At the very least I’ll get some good work done and have something to look back on and compare a few weeks/months from now. Hopefully by that time I’ll be in shape and be able to laugh at just how pathetic I was! In the meantime, I’ll just have to be patient and endure a little embarrassment.