I had some hot spots afterwards, but no blisters, thank heavens. No other foot pains either. I hardly even had any discomfort in my feet in the walk before the run either. There was a tad bit, but I was confident that it would go away quickly, and it did. I'm not even worried about that anymore. My calves aren't super sore anymore either. The bottleneck right now is my lungs. I can keep my legs moving just fine, but I slowly get out of breath. However, I think I diagnosed my problem.
Around the mile marker, when I started to feel tired, I sort of panicked. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to finish. Plus, when you think you're tired and out of breath, you are. It wasn't until my last lap that I discovered my problem. When I was on the last stretch, I started to relax because I was no longer afraid that I'd fail. I started breathing deeper and more slowly. If I had done that alot sooner, I wouldn't have had a problem. I think that's one reason why Jason Robillard, Chris McDougall, and Michael Sandler keep saying to stop thinking about the finish line and just have fun.
I talked about Lee Saxby in my last couple posts. He says that our ankles often tighten up when our wrists are tight. Today, I focused on keeping my arms and wrists loose. I think I'm getting the hang of it. I also quickened my cadence a bit. If only I had an ipod so I could listen to music with 180 bpm. Instead, I have to guess at the right cadence. I'm trying to utilize my tendons as much as possible to conserve my muscle energy.
Also, I timed myself. I ran a mile in about 6:40. Being a running newbie, I wasn't sure how good that is, so I found an online forum about other peoples' mile times and here are some tidbits of what I found:
- "My lowest time so far has been about 8 min and 40 secs."
- "My best is like 10 minutes..."
- "I typically run a 10 minute mile...in high school track a good time for 1 mile was under 6 minutes. LOL I won't see those numbers anytime soon!"
- "MY time was about 12 mins for a mile."
- "I generally run 8:45 per mile in training....7:30 in racing short races."
- "My best time for running 1 mile is 5:08."
- "my best mile time is a 6.40"
- "...i run 530 ish..."
My time obviously won't get me first place in a race, but I've only been running for a couple months. Actually, it's more like one month because the first month was almost entirely composed of dealing with foot pain and shin splints, so I didn't progress much at all. In fact, it was only three weeks ago that I started over, running only 1 lap that first day. Plus, I've never in my life run regularly. I've always been the first to run out of breath. Plus, I'm 4870 feet above sea level where the air is thinner. This morning, I was convinced that I was a really slow runner, but after looking those times up, I'm starting to change my mind. If I'm running a 7-minute mile after running for 3 weeks, imagine how much faster my mile will be here in the next few months. I imagine my speed will increase when I start doing fartlek runs.
Now that I think of it, that might be another reason why I was tired. I was focusing on my mile time, and probably ran faster than I'm used to. Maybe I should slow down a bit. It's difficult for me to run slower and try to maintain my form. The slower I go, the more I bounce, so in trying not to bounce, I naturally speed up. Maybe if my legs were shorter, I wouldn't have this problem. I'm 6'3".
Once again, I'm also pretty sure that I wasn't hydrated enough. In the morning, I wake up, throw on my exercise clothes, drink some water, throw in my contacts, walk to the indoor track, drink a little more water, and run. I highly doubt that's enough water. What I really need to do is hydrate the night before.
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