I never thought I would see the day where I would be writing another blog post about running, but here we are.
Is it even a running post without gratuitous photos of yourself post-run? I guess I was still on the runner’s high that I felt it was a good idea to break my phone out for some reason.
I was overwhelmingly surprised and extremely happy with how this first week went. I know better than to start thinking I am going to set some crazy 5K PR time. After all, it is just week 1. However, I still have fresh in my mind what it felt like all those years ago to start running for the first time. I remember it being nearly impossible to run down the block. I thought I was going to die and I couldn’t breathe. The extensive time on the Peloton has truly paid off because at no point this week did I feel like my lungs couldn’t keep up.
Ironically, my right knee and lower back are what I “felt” the most. My left knee has been the one that has hurt typically, so I was surprised when my right knee started barking. When I started this C25K app, it asked me several questions, and based on my input, it actually wanted to start me off on week 5 of 8, instead of week 1. Given how my knees and back felt, I believe starting at week 1 was the right call. I am in no rush and I want to build things up appropriately to avoid getting injured.
The basic premise of this first week seemed to be intervals (1 minute run, 1.5 minute walk) where day two and day three had an additional two intervals tacked on to the end. This is an OCD thing that I will fully admit, but the Garmin screenshots below bother me a bit because I don’t feel like they are an accurate portrayal of my actual run. These times include the warm-up and part of the cool down, which was all walking, so the average pace will be slower than my run. I wish there was a way to easily track just the running part. For now, I am just starting my watch when the workout begins and then turning it off during the cool down.
When I go back and look at my goals, I first want to run a 5K without walking. Then I have some other goals in mind, one of which would be to run a sub-30 minute 5K.
As I was scrolling through my watch last night, I came across the settings that show V02 max and I did not realize this information was in there, but I hit the wrong button and found myself on a screen that has race predictions. I was pretty hyped up when I saw this. According to my watch’s “Race Predictor”, my 5K time will be 27:10. I am not going to get too excited about all of this just yet. After all, it is still just week 1 and that is the only running data that Garmin has to analyze just yet.
From Garmin’s own website, here is what they have to say about the “Race Predictor”:
Race Predictor projects an ideal race time for different distances, such as 5K, 10K, half and full marathon. This calculation can be accessed from a watch’s performance widget.
The watch will use the VO2 max. estimate and your training history to provide a target race time. The watch analyzes several weeks of your training data to refine the race time estimates.
The projections may seem inaccurate at first. The watch will require a few runs to accurately provide an ideal prediction. These times are just predictions and do not factor in variables including weather, course difficulty or training regimen.
I still have A LOT of work to do.
However, seeing that I could potentially hit a huge PR on something like this has given me a new glimmer of hope. With lifting being more maintenance than anything competitive, this has allowed me to shift my focus just a bit. Only time will tell.