Sticking with the program: Maintaining a decent pace in jogging

in EXHAUST6 days ago

I have a jogging program where I go out and hit the bricks, as they say, at least 3 times a week. I am not trying to break any land-speed records when I do this, nor am I overly concerned about my form and other such things. What I am concerned about is maintaining a certain pace and doing it over a long period of time.

The fastest I have been in recent years was around 6 minutes per kilometer, but this proved to be too taxing on me for me to maintain for any prolonged period of time. I can do it for 3 km or so, but then I start to feel the pain and my heart rate is way too high.


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When I go out now my only real objective is to not stop running but also to not start out too fast and then taper off. This was a real problem for me when I first started doing this on a regular basis, but I feel as though I have a pretty good grasp on it these days.


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There are two things about this particular run that make me happy. One, my heart rate never entered the VO2 Max portion which is normally represented by a red color which means I am doing a sustainable pace and two, that I was able to maintain a relatively equal pace during the entire run except for that one time that I had to stop because i needed to cross the street to continue the running path.


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At the moment I feel like I can manage to maintain this pace for a relatively long period of time and for me at least, the secret has been to not try to be a hero at the start of it. My watch is not good quality enough for it to give me accurate speed every second, but it does a pretty good job of telling me once per km how well I am doing.

I feel as though I know my own legs well enough at this point to maintain a pace within a certain parameter.

I didn't post about it, but not long ago I had a strange something or other happen with one of my calves and a run I went on may have made that problem worse. My time was also over 8 mins per km. Therefore, I am quite happy with this consistency over 7km even though it isn't particularly fast.

With running they say that a huge milestone for longer distance runners is being able to cross over that hump of a 30 minute 5k run. I am still a ways off from that but I am happy with the consistency. I wouldn't say that I am making too much progress, but that is only because I have abandoned the 5k benchmark. I aspire to be able to go much further than that and to run at a consistent speed where I don't feel that my breath, my heart rate, or most importantly, my legs, are getting into a bad state.

In this particular run I only stopped because I didn't bring water with me like a fool, and was very thirsty.

Hopefully I will not forget the next time because honestly, that is not asking a great deal of a person to remember just a few things.

I dont know what it is about me but I get so hyper-focused on my phone, my watch, and my earbuds that I forget to bring something with me that is far more important than any of those... hydration.

I am going to take a break from running for the day because the last time I tried to run 2 days in a row it didn't work out very well for me the second day and it just kind of made me feel like it was a waste. My watch tells me to take breaks and since it reads data that I don't really even know how to interpret, I will give it the benefit of the doubt.

But that doesn't mean that today is lasagna and sofa day. I am going to hit the gym for a light weight session focusing on core exercises.

What did you do today?

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We each have our own goals. Most people cannot run for very long, so if you can do it for a while then you are winning. I am seeing some improvement recently as I try to get back to where I was a couple of years back. I still have hopes of beating some personal records. I had a nice run down the hill I do today. I can see on Strava that others are much quicker, but that doesn't matter. I may do an intervals run tomorrow and then rest a day before parkrun on Saturday. It's turning wetter here, so that may start getting some mud.

!BEER


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it's starting to get very cold where I am but I came prepared this year and have cold weather stuff. i hate running and treadmills and will not do it.

Slower is often faster and you are similar like me it seems having a big bone build so not what is considered a runners body. At my fittest I would do sub 6 minutes per kilometer but would only manage maybe 20 kilometers at this pace and be knackered. If I ran at a steady 8 minutes though I could run for ever. You need to find that comfortable mark and forget about the times so much as you are pushing too hard against the clock. Enjoy the run and do 15 km in your time and you will see the times reduce naturally. Me I did not run as I was out working till late and have been feeling guilty lately and need to get active again.

20km at 6mins is so amazing to me that I can't even imagine being in that sort of shape. Perhaps I was when I was significantly younger

I ran, I run every day !LOL but I need to hit the gym more, it is tough fitting all the things in.

yeah no kidding. Then the eating right haha. that's the toughest for me

I hope Elon Mush never gets invloved in a scandal
Elongate could be really drawn out.

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