runography

It’s all go in the world of Runography, we just finished a long weekend so not much in the way of posting progress. Instead a lot of gardening, beer and wine was had over the weekend.

My son has been nagging me about getting a mobile phone for a while, he’s only 10 and I’ve told him he isn’t going to be getting one until he has a job and can pay for it himself. That’s been my consistent response and I think that’s fair enough. He is a rather unfit young chap and so I had a brainwave last week, I told him I’d get him a mobile phone if he got fit (a PAYG, not a contract mobile). He’s not into playing football/rugby or anything like that, more a tv addict like a lot of kids these days, although he’s been going out a little more often recently. When I mentioned the offer he immediately brightened up and showed an interest that I didn’t expect to see. I’ve seen many a false dawn in this area before to not get too carried away myself. I’ll believe it when I see it. I told him he’d need to setup a training program and stick to it, so that’s what he did. On an A4 sheet of paper we came up with a program that would cover the first week. A tempo run, long run and easy run – similar to my own program. For the first month or so though we’ll be looking at distance rather than speed.

Unfortunately too many things came up to do the midweek runs last week, so his training started at the weekend instead.

On Saturday morning we went to the park in Cambuslang and ran 0.55 miles in 6:49 at a pace of 12:21 min/mi, an absolutely excellent effort for his first run and not once did he complain on the way round. I just heaped encouragement and praise on him all the way and he managed to complete the whole course. We are going out again tonight to repeat this and get him used to doing this distance. The key is to get him confident of doing the distances and the speed will come as he gets fitter and stronger.

After we finished the run, we drove home and I went out for my 2 mile recovery run. I ran 2.18 miles at 8:41 min/mi pace around Blantyre. Started feeling the blister around the 1 mile mark, but didn’t get too bad.

No run on Sunday or Monday. On Monday I spent a few hours doing gardening work and decided to treat myself to a lazy afternoon as the boys were at the seaside with their gran. I was meant to do the following

Easy Run

Dist: 5mi

@ 9:47

Instead of this, I went out with Dave (bairnpunter) on Tuesday and we did his 5 mile tempo run, this was to be done with 3 miles @ 9:07. I was there to help keep the pace and to try and help Dave setup his Nike+ wristband which to date has not worked. Unfortunately we were unable to get the wristband calibrated properly so had to rely on the Garmin again. We did a warmup mile then started on the tempo miles, we did the first @ 9:01, 2nd @ 9:04 and third @ 8:50 – Total time 47:38 for the 5 miles.

Average time over the 3 tempo miles : 8:58 min/mi

I think we averaged around 9:24 min/mi over the full 5 miles so well within my easy run pace of 9:47 min/mi.

I feel a lot better after that run, had a long weekend and needed that to recover. I had been wearing my first pair of proper running socks, Nike DriFit Running socks for which I paid £9.99 for two pairs. I did the 5 mile run without any flareup of the blister, so perhaps these have helped. We’ll find out how good they really are when I go on a long run that involves varied terrain and lots of water/mud.

I’ll let you know how my son gets on with his 2nd run.. hopefully he’ll stick with it.