Another PB

Started the week by completing my 4th ever Parkrun at Arrow Valley Lake. The start had to be moved into a completely new area because the 'Pikey Fair' was in town. Runners weren't too sure where the finish would be. Regardless of the (new) start and finish lines, I finished in 37th place out of a field of 319 runners. I set a new personal best and ran my fastest time ever. My time was 22:10, 4 seconds faster than my previous PB. Cycled to and from the start which was nice.

Heart rate made pretty patterns during my 'interval commute'

Am wanting and hoping to run a 5k in a time of 20 minutes and despite my last 4 races at Parkrun getting progressively quicker, I am still over 2 minutes behind my ideal time. I read somewhere that the only way to run fast, is to run fast. Sounds kinda obvious. However, a lot of my research seems to suggest that running at speed is a good way to improve one’s times and suggests ‘speed work’ or ‘intervals’ is a good way of doing this. With that in mind, I ran my fist work commute ‘interval style’. I ran a familiar route (Bournville into work – 6.5k) but instead of plodding from start to finish, I added a bunch of intervals in the middle section. Essentially, I plodded for 10 minutes (warm up), ran 6 sets of intervals (1 min fast running followed by 1 min walking – recovery) and then plodded to the finish (cool down). My run took longer than usual (about an extra 4 mins) but I felt that perhaps my training was more specific now – who knows? I think I might reduce my fast running times to 30 seconds because I found I couldn’t run hard for 60 seconds at a time and naturally slowed. I’ll keep the recovery time the same. Is all new to me but I guess it’s good to experiment. I wont interval run more than once in any week. I did run one more time in the week, another run commute but this run was just a plod from beginning to end.

Cycled into work on Tuesday and boy, it really was a misty day! Quite nippy first thing in the morning. On the return leg, it was really bright and sunny. So bright and sunny in fact, that the whole of Birmingham seemed to come to life. I hadn't seen the towpath so occupied in such a long time. Commuting became a bit of a menace as the 'one way' tunnels were starting to form queues and the tunnel dwellers appeared reluctant to leave their shelter. It was misty again on my next cycle commute on the Thursday. Terribly warm on the return leg again too. Once home, I removed the winter tyres from my bike and swiftly replaced with the summer ones. Spring has sprung!