Thursday Run - 17km (a change of plan and grabbing a few PB's)

dannewton just finished a 17.13km run, that lasted for 98 minutes.
This run helped dannewton burn 1222.0 calories.

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Description from Strava: So it should've been speedwork as usual for Wednesday (i.e. yesterday) but decided to do things differently. Although sticking to a routine is super useful for me in order to keep training consistently, even I recognise that having a little flexibility in the plan can be beneficial at times.

Yesterday started with another day out Bird Watching. The Reserve was located up in Far Ings, near the River Humber (and of course very close to the Humber Bridge):

It was absolutely freezing once again, but unlike my trip out to Frampton Marsh on Monday, there was very little wind, so didn't actually feel quite as cold. We spent nearly 3 hours slowly wandering round a lovely little reserve. Highlights included a pair of Bearded Tits, a Marsh Harrier and a Redshank.

It was a good day out, but plenty of walking in the cold fresh air left me feeling a little tired, so instead of the 18km Speedwork session I had originally planned, I opted to change and just do a shorter 9km run, just to get something done.

It was under an hour of easy running, which was enough to keep myself ticking over (and of course keep adding to my monthly/year targets).

Another benefit of doing a small run yesterday, was that it enabled m to spend more time with my partner... as the whole point of me having this week off was to make the most of the company before she heads back to University to start the 2nd Semester.

Dawn is working today, so I decided that today I had time to go out for a longer run today to make up for missing the full distance yesterday.

Once again it was flippin' freezing!:

I decided it would be best to wait for the warmest part of the day, to give a chance for any icy/frosty/slippery patches to go away. Mind you, the warmest temperatures today are barely touching 2C (and apparently feel like -3C) so 'warm' is relative I guess!

So at 2pm, and wrapped up warm, I headed on out.

Due to the very cold conditions I was of course wary of potential ice, and as usual I stepped back from running any routes outside of the village. Instead I kept it safe, and chose to run 3 loops around the village.

I was still due a speedwork session this week so I decided that I would run the 1st and 3rd loops slowly as part of a warm up and cool down, and then the middle (2nd) loop I would run as a time trial to see how fast I could run it. I wasn't going all out, but I was pushing hard throughout the 2nd loop at approx 90-95% effort

The graph below shows the breakdown of the run

I managed to maintain the pace of that middle 5km somewhere between 5:00 and 4:20mins per km, and as that was significant harder than I pushed in the previous weeks, it promptly rewarded me with a selection of PB's for different distances:

The one I'm most pleased with is the new '5km PB' of 23:11. This only shows it as the fastest that Strava has recorded me running (in the last 7 years). My absolute PB in the 5km distance stands at 23:01 which was recorded in a local 5km race in Lincoln over 15 years ago.

In those 15 years there has been a lot that has happened, and running was often forgotten. I never expected to get anywhere close to that time again, so todays result is an unexpected but very much appreciated one :-)

I reckon a few more weeks of speedwork training, featuring both shorter intervals and longer tempo runs, and then I'll give this another go.... I think I can go quicker...

After the hard session today, I will have a much needed and much deserved rest day tomorrow. Saturday will be a short easy run, and then I'll be do the usual long run on the Sunday (and I'll be a little bit more organized for that long run this time!

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If you would like to check out this activity on strava you can see it here:
https://www.strava.com/activities/10582796604

About the Athlete: Living in the UK, I am an intermittent Runner, but always striving for more consistency. When I'm not training I can be found photographing insects or listening to really loud angry music (which is the best type of music obviously!)

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