Breaking Through

Distance: 1 mile
Time: 8:44

I ran my standard route again tonight, though I was tempted to change it up. I'm beginning to get bored of my same old out-and-back route. However, when I began training I told myself that I was going to run the same mile long course until I could run it with little effort. To date, I'm still clocking in slow times, though they are slowly improving. I think I need to stick it out a bit more before I can reward myself with more interesting runs.

Tonight I ran an 8:44, which is actually the fastest I've run this route (though only the 3rd fastest mile since I started training). I had heretofore never even broken 9:00 on this route, so I do consider tonight's run a breakthrough. If I can keep it sub-9 tomorrow and Friday as well, I will be one step closer to moving on to the next stage of my training, which will be to increase distance.

I think a couple of things helped me get a better time tonight. For one, it was a perfectly calm evening. With no wind pushing against me on the second half of the mile, I was free to keep a steadier pace. And two, I did a much better job of pushing the pace for the first half. Whereas before I always felt like I started off too slow, today I made a conscientious effort to run fast to begin with and just leave the rest up to fate. I did feel the extra fatigue at the end, but overall the extra speed didn't ruin the run. I was able to maintain my pace and improve my time for this route.