Day: November 17, 2016

A Day of Personal Bests

file_000-67Today was a day of personal bests for me, and I couldn’t be more excited! I started the morning off as I always do; with push ups. Today, I decided to go up from the 45 I’ve been doing for the past few days by doing 50 push ups and I did it! It was hard and I had to push myself a little, but I got to 50 and stopped. Could I have done more? Probably, but not many more. I’ve been doing a good job of avoiding injury, so I didn’t push myself to a breaking point. Just to 50 and stopped.

Then came the run. I decided to stretch out the legs a little and start with a faster pace. I normally don’t like to do this, but I decided to stretch the pace by increasing the distance my legs kicked out, and I concentrated on the feeling in my feet as I pushed the ground away from me. It’s hard to explain, but I could actually feel the speed this time. I got into a comfortable run pace and held it steady for three miles, which is a huge win for me.

I didn’t look at my pace or splits during the run; I wanted to just give it what I thought I needed to give to get a decent time, and it worked. I was able to run 3.52 miles with a 9’26” pace! My two mile time was 18’08” (my goal was to do it under 19′) and my three mile time was 27’46” which for my age would be a passing (decent) run in the Marine Corps PFT. This is a benchmark for me. I wore my USMC dress blues this past weekend as I was within the height/weight regulations, and now I’m able to run within the USMC PT standards as well. If I had a pull up bar and someone to hold my feet, I could have done the pull ups and crunches to see what score I could get for my age. Maybe some weekend I’ll go to a park with Sherry and take a PFT to see how I do.

I am very happy this morning! My weight is still declining, my physical abilities are increasing, and I’m feeling great. I have a good burn in my legs today from pushing it out a little harder than normal, but none of the bad pain. And to think, I just started running on September 10th of this year, and already, I’m running sub-10 minute miles. Heck, I’m almost to running sub-9’s consistently!

Back-to-back runs

Friday morning, I ran. This is not a big deal, and normally isn’t blog worthy in and of itself, but what is significant is that I ran after running Thursday and not taking a rest day. My pace was on-par with my average runs, and the distance was 3.5 miles.

I did have a little bit of pain in my left hip, but I think that was because I pushed it and sprinted in the last mile a few times. Maybe I’m not ready for that just yet, but the run itself was nice, and I wasn’t in any discomfort or pain with the exception of the little aches I get typically when I start. I infer those as my muscles saying, “Dude. Why are we doing this. You know, you can just stop and we’ll stop bothering you” which then turns into, “Oh well. You’re not going to stop. We might as well join the rest of the team and just get through this.” It typically happens around the .5 to 1 mile mark and then the rest of the run is just fine.

My ultimate goal is to run 5-6 times a week without it being hard. I don’t want to run super-long distances, nor am I looking to break any land/speed records. I just want to go out, run 4-5 miles, and feel normal afterward. I’m not quite there yet, but I’m getting there, and that feels good.

Now, however, I think that maybe running 4 times a week max is a better plan for the time being. After taking three days off to allow a spot on my heel to heal (haha),  a lot of other pains and aches I’ve been having have gone away. I think I needed the time to rest and to let the joints and muscles heal a bit. I haven’t been pushing myself hard, but maybe back-to-back runs are a bit much for me. Only time will tell, and we’ll see. The point is, I’m not going to push it to get to daily runs just yet. Maybe after another month or two, but for now, I’m okay with every other day.

As for push-ups, I’m up to 45 consistently now. I’ll likely up that to 50 soon, but again, I’m pretty pleased with the progress.