Ouch! My thighs are sore today. I forgot how much hard work running is! It felt great to be out there yesterday afternoon though but I didn’t do as well as I would have liked to.
Like I said yesterday morning, my aim was three miles but when I got to mile one, I knew that I would never make it another two miles. To be honest, I was struggling before I even got to mile one. At 1.33 miles, I had to stop and walk because my throat was killing me from breathing too heavily and I needed to just catch my breathe. I let myself walk for 2.5 minutes and then I ran the rest of the way stopping as soon as Run Keeper announced I was at two miles.
I’m a bit disappointed in myself really. Considering I had managed to get myself up to four miles only a few months ago and now I’ve halved it. I do realise that even though I have been exercising, running uses muscles I haven’t been using for the last month. There are two factors that probably made me not perform at my best too. The first being that I ate breakfast at 9.30AM and didn’t go out running until 12.40PM. As I left the house, I had the shakes because I was getting hungry – NOT the best timing to be running. The reason it took me so long to go out was because I was waiting for Alex to get up and ready so he could watch the kids while I went out. He stayed the night and hadn’t had a good night at all. He suffers with airborne allergies – dust mites, hay fever, cat and dog hair, both of which I have – and he hadn’t been taking his antihistamines for about a week and a half and so his asthma was really bad. He had a horrible cough and was up quite a lot with it through the night so I wasn’t about to storm up there and tell him to get out of bed so I could go running. I didn’t want to snack though as I didn’t know when he was getting up and didn’t want to have to wait any longer to let my food go down if he did decide to get up. The second factor was that I definitely wasn’t hydrated enough. I realised just before I left that I hadn’t drank any water all morning so I had a couple of mouthfuls of water and then left. Pretty much most of the day then I had a dehydrated headache. This was my own fault and I know it can affect my performance so it won’t happen again.
Run Keeper is fantastic. It really helped me keep on track to mile two and it was great just being able to run wherever I wanted rather than having to track where I’m going before hand so that I know how far I’m going. The audio cues every mile are great and will help me more once I start to do longer runs – I’m hoping to be able to run ten miles by the end of the year. I’d definitely recommend it to anyone who has an iPhone.
The weather yesterday was lovely. I actually went out there in just a tank top which is amazing considering I haven’t done that since September. It felt great not to be freezing for the five minutes of being outside. When I got home, I went straight out into the back garden with a pint of water and my protein bar to cool down a bit. Its a lovely day today too but I don’t have the time to run today so I’m going out tomorrow. I’m looking forward to it and I will get that three miles by this time next week!