Another run before the soreness kicks in

After a hard run, or any suf­fi­cient­ly intense work­out, I can some­times be sore for a few days. That’s not uncom­mon but it is some­times sur­pris­ing to me how the sore­ness does­n’t set in until the sec­ond day. 

After last Sun­day’s run I was­n’t recov­ered enough to run again until Sat­ur­day. Sat­ur­day’s run was hard­er than that one. I was look­ing at the like­li­hood that it could be sev­er­al days before my next run.

What­ev­er it is that caus­es my sore­ness to skip a day I looked at it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty. I did­n’t want to over­do any­thing, but I thought a short run would be good while I still could.

Though I want­ed less total mileage today, I still want­ed some inten­si­ty. I’m not going to get back to form by tak­ing it easy and there’s not much point in get­ting out there if I’m not get­ting back to form. Run­ning has always been effort, of course. But I used to bet­ter equipped to put in that effort. 

So I took the guide­line I estab­lished yes­ter­day, 5K, and decid­ed to do that run with less walk­ing in the intervals. 

I took my walk­ing mile to warm up, then ran for a mile and a half, walked for a half mile out by the mod­el air­plane field where I took pic­tures, and then ran anoth­er 1.6 miles. The rest of the way home I walked to cool down. Total mileage was 5.2: 3.1 run­ning and 2.1 walking. 

My pace is still quite slow but I’m get­ting my heart rate up to a range where I don’t think it’s pru­dent to try to push much hard­er. By the old (and obvi­ous­ly faulty) for­mu­la I’m rou­tine­ly run­ning at 105% of my max­i­mum heart-rate. I think I can’t ask for much more than that. 

I would­n’t be sur­prised if I have trou­ble walk­ing tomor­row. My guess is that what­ev­er sore­ness I could have expect­ed for tomor­row if I had­n’t tak­en the run today will be mag­ni­fied. But tak­ing a few days with­out run­ning after two days on seems a lot bet­ter than a few days off after only one day on.