Couch to 5K: Week 9, Day 2

I did week 9, day 2 Sunday morning.  I went out with the hope of picking up the pace a bit over what I did Friday.  I'm still monitoring my pace by counting strides.  I tried to stay at or around 160-165 strides per minute.  Friday I ran closer to 150 per minute.  I was able to maintain the 160ish pace for the whole run, but didn't have much left to push out a faster pace for the final couple of minutes.  That's okay, I now know my max pace and where to work up from.     

Sunday morning was a good morning for a run.  The weather was almost perfect.  It was just a tad too breezy from time to time, but not to the point that I couldn't run.  I started out at the usual place and took a 4 minute warm up walk.  I've decreased the walk to 4 minutes because I'm running out of room to run, and I seem to be just as ready to run at 4 minutes as I was at 5.  The first 10-15 minutes of the run can be quite tedious and sometimes discouraging.  I don't know why, but those first minutes always seem the hardest.  There's a nice window somewhere between 10 minutes and 25 minutes where everything feels just right and I feel like I could run forever.  The I hit another tough patch for about the last 5 minutes.  It's been awhile since I felt like I'm really struggling just to put one foot in front of the other like I did on occasion in those first few weeks though.

I successfully picked up the pace today.  I got to the parking lot and still had two minutes left so I turned right into the parking lot ran to the end and then back to the road.  There was still about a minute left, so I went back and did half the parking lot again before finishing up at exactly 34 minutes.

Today's Stats: I estimated my additional parking lot mileage to be around .15 so I'm estimating I ran a total of 2.95 miles in 34 minutes for a per mile pace of 11:32.

Up Next:  The last day.  That's right, I plan to run week 9, day 3 on tomorrow morning.  I'm also trying to find a 5K to do soon.  I didn't get to the pool at all last week, but I'm planning to go this evening.