Monday, 13 September 2010

52. Place in top 10% of a 5km run

I figure the first thing I need in order to achieve this is to actually be able to run 5km. I don't know what a kilometre actually is - some European measurement of distance obviously but, frankly, a mile makes more sense. A furlong even. Damn those foreign measurements.

Anyway, I have added running to my gym 'regime' (a word that exaggerates to a considerable degree what it is I actually do with weights). Over the last 5 days I have run on a treadmill twice - 12 minutes each time at 9 km/h. After the first time I ached in places I couldn't begin to describe here - this isn't that kind of a blog. Today's little trot was much less painful, happily.

But how do I progress?

My instinct is to increase the run by a minute on every second run until either I find the gym isn't open long enough to accommodate my session any more or until the effort kills me. (I prefer the former).

On the other hand, the target here is to run 5km quickly - more quickly than 90% of the (as yet unidentified) field. I assume that to be good at 5km you need to be able to run considerably further than 5km in order to gain the fitness necessary to speed up at the lesser distance.

Confused, I've decided to add a minute to my run-time on every second run until I am running for half an hour. I like this approach because it gives me constant improvement which is good for the soul (if not for the soles).

Once I am running for half an hour at 9km/h secondary school maths tells me I will be covering 4.5km in distance. So maybe from there I'll try some longer-distance runs - 6 or 7km - interspersed with shorter, quicker runs. I will have to look into how one increases one's running speed.

And I imagine I'll eventually have to go out and run on the ground too because I'm already aware that treadmill running is way easier than real running.
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