Today was a 2 miler, which means that I actually only ran 1.98 miles. But I averaged a pace of 10:58 in the first mile, and the second one was a 10:31. And I think my first mile was probably around a 10:30 as well, except that I started the counter when I started walking, and walked about a block to get my legs warmed up.
Today’s run was a little on the painful side. I’m trying to decide if the pain is because my calves are wasted from doing something new, or if I am just being whiny. I’m pretty sure it is a little of both. I re-read the advice on barefooting and running close to barefoot, and I think I wasn’t letting my heel touch down enough. So this morning I tried to focus on allowing my foot to touch down and allow the heel to touch down all the way. If you watch some of the videos of barefoot runners striding on pressure plates, you can see that the whole foot touches down at some point during the footfall.
This one shows it well, right around 3:30
My calf pain probably comes from a combination of not letting my heel down on the footfall – basically springing along, as well as dealing with the changes in the running style.
My feet this morning were cold, but really, at no point was there any pain from them. Running on asphalt primarily this morning, and so there wasn’t much in the way of pokey things to deal with, and only a little bit of glass in certain areas.
I attribute my faster pace to a faster cadence – I bumped the metronome up to 85 BPM from 80, which means that my feet were moving that much faster – 170 steps per minute over 160. I’m going to keep it at 85 for the next week or so, as the increase in pace did not feel like too much more of an effort, and at times I felt like it was a little on the slow side. Of course, I still have to keep in mind that when I feel like I could go faster, I probably shouldn’t (not quite yet) – my reasoning being that I am still trying to entrain my brain to a specific cadence. Surging and then easing back isn’t going to work on a long haul run.
I had the thought “what are your doing?” at about the same spot today as I did the other day. I was thinking about what, if any gains that I have made in my endurance and strength, and if those will increase quickly enough so that I can reach the goal of finishing the marathon in under 4 hours. It is a sort of sense of wonder.
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