Week 5, complete! It’s been another fun week, times are only slightly up from last week and still feeling pretty good.  I’m up to 3hrs a week of running, which isnt a million miles away from what I was doing at my peak training for marathons. I’m still searching for the most efficient training so this week I tried doing my morning run after dropping my stuff off at work in the morning. It worked ok, i’m not convinced it’s much more efficient but i’ll carry on to see if it works out.

My proper swim session was cancelled for today so my swimming is slightly down on what it should be. The pool was absolutely packed this evening so I didn’t hang around too much, I did do quite a bit of swimming breathing every four strokes. My aim is still three, but after breathing for four, three feels really comfortable, so i’ll keep doing that.

My run today was good, but really cold. I have a ridiculous and frustrating condition in my hands called Reynauld’s which is an over reaction to temperatures. It means in cold weather my hands get cold, then white, then painfully cold and then they never recover. Once cold, they stay cold for the whole run. Its very annoying. I love running in the winter, but I hate cold hands. Today I ran with some really thick ski gloves and still got the same issues towards the end (although the temperature was probably only just above freezing so to get an hour was pretty good for me).

My time splits out today looked pretty fast, I saw my first mile in under 9 min/mile, then I hit one at 8:45. This is pretty close to what I was doing for marathon training, but now i’m doing it whilst keeping my heart rate low. Its definitely progress! It got me thinking, I wonder if I could create a graph to show my progress…….

I’m going to say i’m getting faster even as my weekly distances increase. This is the combined mileage for the week, and the average speed for each run. I then wondered if the same was true with my cycling….

…. and it is! Go me! I got so excited with my new found graphs I put a page together here. Try to keep it calm when you look at those all on one page.

The actual details on what i’ve done this week are here. As usual, let me know what you think 🙂