Wednesday, April 29, 2009

10 Miles on Trail Yesterday

Well I finally forced myself to get a trail run in yesterday and skip out on the easy, flat pavement course. For some reason I have a negative feeling about trails (because they force me to push myself) and so every time I park my car at the park and stand up, I consider getting back in and taking a nap at home. It's also hard for me to want to run because the trail doesn't have mile markers so I'm usually running around aimlessly, trying not to repeat the same path I just took. Ay ay ay.

Anyway, there is a small section of trail that I always love and it involves a lot of hills and some technical paths. I decided to run on it for 9:30 minutes, estimating that was about a mile, and then I turned around. I did that five times, thus (hopefully) running 10 miles.

For the past 5 or so runs, I have found that running fartleks the entire time has helped me tremendously. Well...I don't know if you'd consider what I do as a fartlek. What works for me is sprinting every other 15-50 steps, depending on how I feel.

Yesterday I ran the first 4 miles at the same pace and I was kind of sluggish and dragging my feet. Then I remembered that I should do fartleks and immediately my run was more entertaining and the counting kept my mind going and I immediately got out of that tired-feeling mood. If I don't do them, it's very easy for me to run slowly, forgetting that I can actually run faster and push myself.

Soo...I don't know if doing this for 5+ miles is a good thing or not because I'm not actually running at a consistent pace the whole time. However, I do know that this strategy picks my legs up higher and faster and my "slow steps" (when I'm not sprinting) eventually get faster too.

As I was on my 8th mile, Chris happened to be at the park and see me so we ran the last two miles together. Running with someone is always easier than doing it alone! All in all, I'm glad I made myself get out there on the trail. Twas a good run.