C25K Week Four, Take Two

Because I wasn't able to do the entire workout at the end of last week, I decided to redo the fourth week of workouts in the C25K program. But I also decided to make an important change. Instead of splitting my workouts between the treadmill and the park, I wanted to do all three of the runs outside in the park this week.

I decided to do this because running outside has been so much more difficult than running inside on a treadmill. It turns out that there are a lot of reasons for this, from hills requiring more work to get up to gravel, asphalt, and concrete being harder than treadmills. Since the 5K I'm preparing for is going to be outside, I should probably get better at running outside.

As expected, the first run of the week was really hard. Almost impossible. But I finished it! I even kept up a decent pace through the whole run. My calves hurt more than they've ever hurt, but I keep telling myself that the pain will eventually go away. It means I'm developing muscles, which is a good thing.

Pace from the week's first run. I'm not sure what that spike at the end is from, I was probably running down a hill.

I ended up skipping my Wednesday run. We hired a cleaning service that was supposed to come by the house between 2:30 and 5:30, but they didn't show up until almost 6:30. I didn't want to go for a run while they were there and by the time they had finished the sun was almost down. We had company on both Thursday and Friday that also made it difficult to schedule a run.

I was able to go for a run on Saturday, with Sarah. Having someone to run with made the whole thing a lot easier. I mean, the run was still hard, but I was also maintaining a faster pace than I had been. And while I was tired and sore following the run, I didn't feel like death. It seems to be taking me less time to recover, too.

Pace from the run on Saturday. We started pretty fast, and while we did slow down, we still kept up a pretty good pace.

All in all, I feel a lot more confident about moving on to the fifth week. It will be an interesting week as the first workout actually has less running than the fourth week (3 5-minute intervals, compared with 2 5-minute and 2 3-minute intervals). But the third workout is just a 20 minute run. A week ago that terrified me. Now I'm actually interested in whether or not I'll be able to do it.

I'm feeling more confident in general about the upcoming 5K. Even if I can't run the entire thing,  know that at this point I'll be able to finish it.