Woahhh, time to dust the cobwebs off this blog, hey? It’s been a while and I’ve been guilty of neglecting this blog and focusing solely on my main blog.
Poop.
On Sunday, I ran a 10km race.
This is the first 10km I’ve ran. The only over races I have ever ran in are 3 Race for Life events, but the last one I did was easily 3 years ago.
It started at 9am and we got there in plenty of time. The first thing I noticed was the amount of people warming up and running around the city beforehand.
Race for life events are very light hearted, with many people walking most of it in fancy dress and having fun while raising a bit of money. I didn’t expect a 10k to be that much different. I knew there would be serious people wanting to hit their personal best, people that have trained hard and long, but I thought there would be a lot more people that were taking a laid back approach to it.
I think If I had known this, I might have tried a bit harder to work on my speed.
I started running in July and quickly built my stamina up. I ran 10 miles within a month. It took me 2 hours and 17 minutes. I never thought I would be able to run 1 mile, never mind 10 and I was so surprised how quickly I was able to build up a decent distance.
Building up speed is a totally different story.
I’ve never been good at sport. As a child, I did ballet, tap and jazz dancing as well as swimming outside of school. I was never fast at swimming and I was never flexible enough for dancing. I’ve got my dads old, stiff bones and I can only touch my toes with my legs straight if I stretch and train myself to do it for a couple of months.
Yup.
I’m just not built for sport.
It was the same old story in school, I was never the first to be picked for teams in PE and I could never get that bloody ball in the basket.
When I was 11, I was part of the school hockey team. We would play against other teams in our area. I was the goal keeper. Do you know how many games we won??
NONE. NOT ONE. A full season, we did not win one game.
I was taken out of the ‘goalie’ position the following year and just kind of ran around hoping nobody would hit the hockey ball in my direction.
And then I quit.
My commitment.
I’ve decided to work on my speed.
I’m going to aim to run a 5k race in June in under 30 minutes, which is a sub 10 minute mile.
The fastest mile I’ve ever ran was 10:18.
I’ll be researching how to increase my speed, which will probably include a lot of interval training. I have no idea how easy/hard it will be as how I have never been concerned with how fast I can run.
I’ll keep you updated…