Things have been buzzing for me since saturday. I went down to the local running track and re-calibrated my Nike+ system. As mentioned before, I knew it was falling well short of the correct distance. As it turned out I was losing 700m over 10km! That is quite a difference. As I was recalibrating I could see it was short roughly 7m over 100. The process actually involves a minimum distance of 400m which is the same as one lap of the inside lane of the track. You have to run it once (I did twice to be sure) and then a walking version.

The result has been astounding, and inspiring too. Having got things set I left the track and did 11km over a fairly flat course. On that run I broke the 40 minute mark. I knew I could from my run in Battersea Park. That was good.

On Monday I went out at lunch and did a river circuit, holborn - temple - tower - westminster - temple and back to holborn. It worked out about 15.3km and I finished in 59min something. Wow! That was sweet. I was averageing under 4 minutes per km over 15km! Previously it was taking me that long to do about 12.5km.

So I went out at lunch today with the intention to just clock up some distance for one of my challenges but didn’t think I was up to a big or fast one. As it went I felt better and better although I didn’t think I was pushing it. This time I went out as far as Vauxhall Bridge and back. The distance when I got back to the office was (I think) 17.1km. The time was just over 1hr 5min! When I uploaded my run it clocked my 10km at 37′37″. Holy shit. That is unbelievable! I remember when I was happy to do a 10 minute mile, which seemed a long way at that! My 5km was 18′31″ too. If I can keep this up I’ll be well happy. The other thing was that I didn’t feel like I was pushing myself either so I hope there is room for development yet. If I can translate that time in to a triathlon I feel confident I could break the top 10.

Anyway, that’s enough of my bragging. Sorry. I am just buzzing about it. If you didn’t know, 15 years ago I weighed about 18 stone (252 pounds) and did no excercise to think of. I could just about muster the strength to run for a bus!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 8th, 2007 at 10:15 pm and is filed under running. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.