Monday Morning Runs

Monday morning runs, kinda hurt.  Often I don't get enough sleep, and last night was no different.  It doesn't help that Number 4 was awake often and loudly last night, but at 4:40 when the alarms went off, I dragged myself from bed and got ready to go pound some pavement.  I did the 5K loop around town as I wanted the hills this morning.  The half-way point is just before I leave my neighborhood proper, and drop down into a city park that leads to "old town" and the long hill.  So I could, in theory just turn around and retrace my steps back from whence I came, and still clock the 5K.  But hey, where is the fun in that?  That long hill is a nice training climb, and as most of the races I am likely to do will have hills in them, there is no reason to shun them now.  Even if they don't believe in Candy Mountain.

My knees no longer hurt when I finish, it is now just my right ankle.  And it feels like it just needs a really good POP to fix that.  I almost got a good solid pop out of it this morning and it feels much better.  Oddly, it only starts hurting after I stop running and am walking the cool down "lap" in front of the house.  In fact, my legs feel good enough that I am wearing my boots again at work in stead of my old sneakers.  Also, I ran this one slow enough that I was listening to Wagner at the end, which I hadn't done yet up to today.  I have been running at the 10:30 mark for the last two weeks, and I knew I was slower this morning, but I didn't push when I was going downhill and I didn't try to "kick" when I got the "300 Meters left" notification from the voice in my head.  I maintained a steady pace and I am pleased that even on barely 5 hours of interrupted sleep I was able to maintain my pace.

I am looking forward to running again on Thursday, I want to see how I do after a couple of days rest--just like on race day.  In only 6 days, I will have knocked out the second 5K race, and the first one that I will have run entirely.  I am now looking forward to the next run in May.  I am working up a training schedule based on several different ones found on-line, so I will be chronicling what I am doing and with what sort of frequency.  I think that the main thing I will be putting forth on here is that there should not be any hard, set-in-stone schedules and that training for the non-professional runner should be fairly loose.  We already have too many things demanding our attention, this is a chosen hobby, it should be fun and NOT work.  I will unveil the schedule next week, and you will see it will be relaxed and loose.