45 minutes, 5.6 miles

Ham­mer­head has been encour­ag­ing me to do longer runs, so last night at the gym I start­ed out by set­ting the timer to 45 min­utes. There were lots of machines free, so I did­n’t feel guilty about ignor­ing the 30-minute time limit.

First, I matched my old goal: I did four miles in 29:30. That actu­al­ly beat my best time by a few sec­onds. Then I dropped the speed way down to around 4 mph to rest for 5 min­utes, then brought my speed up grad­u­al­ly until I did a burn at 9.8 mph for one minute before the 45 minute timer went off. At 45 min­utes, I’d com­plet­ed 5.6 miles, which breaks down to four 7.5‑minute miles and 1.6 9 and 3/8‑minute miles.

Today, my legs actu­al­ly hurt. That has­n’t hap­pened in a while. The last time I felt my legs hurt the day after exer­cise, well, it was a long time ago. My legs are still pret­ty strong, and I’m still pret­ty lazy.

I real­ly need to get some run­ning shoes some­time, so that I can start run­ning on some real ter­rain instead of just at the gym.