Goal Set Met

Today, Joanne and I ran the Tree-Athlon, a 5k in Battersea Park.

My goal for the run was to run in in 30 minutes. I came in at 30:01, but giving all the faffing about at the starting line -- it was at least 30 seconds before there was room enough to run -- I'm going to consider that under 30 minutes.

The course made it easy to hit the 30 minute mark. They had every half kilometer marked, so I could check that each one was taking around 3 minutes. Podrunner helped as well. The 148 bmp Paradiddle turned out the be exactly the right rhythm.

Lately, I've been working on my breathing. Usually after 5 or 10 minutes, I can breath in four beats and breath out four beets (on my left foot) without having to think about it too much. That only really happened for two kilometers today. The rest of the time I had to really focus on it.

All in all, it wasn't as easy as I would have liked, but it wasn't terribly hard, either. However, at around 3.5 kilometers my calves were really burning, and I convinced myself that at around 4.5 kilometers they would seize up the way they used to back when I was a skater kid. I did my best to put the thought out of my mind.

I said that when I was finally able to run a 5k in under 30 minutes, I would shave off my beard. So guess what? No more beard. Just be prepared for that next time you see me. I look kinda weird without the beard. I've only had the full-on beard for about two years or so, but I've gotten used to it. It's gone now.

So now it's time to set another goal. At this point, that's just going to be finishing the 10k I'm running in two weeks. Two of weeks of back pain and recovery have really messed up my training, so I'm not feeling entirely prepared for the 10k. So the goal is just to finish the thing, running the whole way. Even if that mean running really, really slooooow.