Monday, May 5, 2008

Four Miles

Four miles doesn’t sound like much, especially when you know you’ve done more than 20 previously (in another life, it seems). But getting those 4 miles done on Saturday felt like a huge accomplishment to me. Last week I did the 3 miles at a walk due to being the Caboose. That combined with a spotty running schedule made me very wary of those 4 miles.

I decided to take them on at a run 1/walk 1 pace to go along with the comfort level of a few people in my Blue ARRC group. It felt terrific and very comfortable. It took pretty much 1 hour on the nose and I’m happy with that 15 min/mile (4 mile/hour) average. I think I must have been jogging faster than I normally do when I’m trying to get through 3 or 5 minutes at a time. That average was particularly good considering we walked the first 5 minutes out and the last back. I also walked up the huge incline up from K St to M St.

I really liked the variety of it. I didn’t have very long to go before I knew a break was coming. In fact, it was like I was constantly on the verge of a break so I didn’t have much opportunity to get tired. I may stick with this for a bit and see how it goes. I loved feeling good when I was done – I felt like I got a good workout but I wasn’t zapped completely.

2 comments:

MJ said...

It *is* amazing what your body can do when you just learn to work with it and/or relax into a certain pace, isn't it? When I did the 5k a couple of weekends ago, I was astounded when they said there was only 1 mile left. I thought "you're joking!" as at the time I felt really good! You go, girl!

HEALTHY AMELIA said...

Thanks, MJ! It sounds like the 5k went really well for you. That is awesome. Looking up to see there’s “only” one more mile left is an incredible feeling. I felt kind of like that on Saturday. The only thing that had me daunted was the huge hill up from the water in Georgetown. I just flat-out refused to run up it (it was towards the end of the route). I’m glad I did walk it, though, because I had energy to keep going the rest of the way afterwards.