One of my main goals this year was to run consistently at a moderate pace to bring down my run time. I haven’t been 100% consistent, but I’ve hit many of the workouts. My weight is still kind of high, but it seems like I’ve plateaued and the weight will start coming off (we’ll see!).
Anyway….yesterday was a Physical Fitness Test at drill. It’s a standard three-mile course that we’ve been running once every month. This month, I wasn’t expecting to run it really hard, but when we started, I felt good and decided to go with it. There were a couple other Marines running about 20 yards ahead for the first half, and I was just trying to stick with them to see how long they would hold the pace. I didn’t know how fast we were running, but we hit the half-way point at 8:40. Wow! At first, I started thinking that we were slow, running an 8:40 mile, but then I remembered it was 1.5 miles at that point, and I started thinking “Hey, maybe I can hit the holy grail of 18:00 and max this thing!” Going into the turn-around, I had surged a bit, and then kept up that surge right after the turn and passed the two other Marines. I held the pace, and put forth a 105% effort to come in at 17:40, holding off a last-100-yard surge from another Marine.
This is a life-time Personal Record. I never ran this fast even in my college days. So, my strategy for run training is working. Yeehaw!
Now I just need to confirm if the bike training is working. The indoor test a couple weeks ago was nice, but I’m not confident it gives me the whole picture. It might be a while yet til I get a nice afternoon with enough time to do my 40k route. I’m excited about it, but I think I’m going to be a couple minutes shy of the goal. I wanted to double my bike volume from last year, and I’m only about 60% higher than last year; my average run volume has fully doubled, and that successful progress is evident.
1 comment:
Great Run!
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