Reality Check

The last few days have actually gone ok. I’ve been feeling under the weather and struggling with a cough, but I’ve still managed to get a few training sessions under the belt. The best news is that the swimming is starting to improve ever so slightly. At the beginning of December I was lucky to manage 400-500 metres non-stop at the start of a swim. This improved to 600m in January and on my last swim on Monday evening I managed 900m non-stop. I actually thought I had done 750m which is why I stopped. If I had know I was so close to the kilometre I would have kept going. Being able to swim 1km without stopping is the first big goal. After that, I will be looking at 1.5km and then 2km.

I went for a jog yesterday evening. I was nervous as could feel my calf slightly so just took it easy. It didn’t feel great any of the way around, and when I uploaded the run it made for uncomfortable reading. It turns out there is a feature on Strava which I hadn’t noticed before which groups runs over the same route together. This is shown in the screenshot below.

I have now run this 10k route 59 times, and my storming run of 5:02 min/k pace last night was only the second time I have run outside 5min/k pace, but it was a good 30 seconds a kilometre off my average and a minute down off my best runs on this route. That is a bit of a wake up call. I don’t enjoy running slow, so maybe I just have to forget about the possibilities of injury and just let myself run free