Lyrics: “Little Changes”, Frank Turner, 2018
It’s September! The stores sell Halloween decoration and gingerbread! Way too early, but that’s not my point today. It’s September and I don’t need it to be close to 30 °C anymore. I don’t even need that in the middle of summer. To be honest I don’t know how hot it actually was outside, as I stayed indoors with the blinds closed most of the time.
I spent a rather relaxed weekend. Watching TV. Working on my “10 years since I went to my first Frank Turner gig” post, which will be up tomorrow. Making a tiny start on cleaning out cupboard in the family home. Small steps. Making some changes to my running routine. Zentangling…
At work the supervisor is back from a longer leave plus we got an intern for the month, so I headed into the office yesterday to be on hands. To update the supervisor on relevant urgent stuff and be around for the intern on their first day. I’m all for offering placements for interns, because we need new staff sooner or later and it’s always good to get people interested in your field of work. But explaining stuff and talking about stuff and teaching stuff takes time. I’m just glad I could do that from home today in my flat, which wasn’t too overheated yet and hopefully won’t be over the next couple of days.
So, the running…. I wasn’t quite happy anymore with the Garmin Coach program, which had gotten me up to a good start, but felt rather inflexible now. So I decided to move forward with my own sort of training program. Which might go totally wrong, because I just read a bit on a few running websites. But the plan for now is to do one longer run on the weekend with a moderate (aka slow) pace as it is adviced for beginners. Run slow! The Garmin program had me running too fast, because I was always trying to beat the previous time and didn’t watch out for my heart rate and such. The long Garmin run so far were 2.41 km (1.5 miles), which I’ve been doing in 22 minutes / 9:10 pace the last time. But with my heartrate in the upper regions, which is not advised. So on Sunday I decided to go for a longer run (3km ~ 30 minutes) and set the training program on my watch to a moderate(r) heart rate and made myself check that instead of the time. With a 9:48 pace I was running slower, but no surprise I felt less out of breath and shattered after. I think I could have gone on for a while longer. Which is the plan for this weekend.
I plan to do two shorter interval / tempo runs during the week. As stated above mainly based on my own googling and reading. Going for 1.75 km and switching tempo (moderate / fast) every 200/100 or 150 metres. Still testing it out. Did the first this morning with a running pace of 8:44. I had my playlist times perfectly to end the last sprint to my favourite motivational part of Frank Turner’s “Punches”, but that was a bit of luck. I need to tweak the route I’m running on a bit maybe, but all in all that might be a solid plan for the next few weeks.
Not much else to tell: I’m binge watching “The Rookie” thanks to a friend’s recommendation a few weeks ago. And as mentioned above I’m otherwise chilling with Zentangling and catching up on podcasts. Boring AF, but I don’t care….
