For the First Time in Forever

Earlier this week, I shared how I had to (yet again) adjust the training schedule I had laid out for the Star Wars Dark Side 10K.  Everything seemed to be blocking us from regular training sessions, including injury.  Today, I am proud to say that we completed the first two cross-training sessions that I had listed on the new schedule.

And then, last night, the Nerd Husband and I got out for the "First Time In Forever" to run (fun little Frozen reference there...totally accidental, and then I realized it - it made me giggle).  It was hard to push off that guilty feeling that we'd been falling behind on our training, but taking the break really made more sense than pushing it through illness and injury.  Much better to sit out, rest, and get back at it slowly but surely.  We talked it out and figured we'd adjust our walk/run interval slightly until we got back into the groove of things.  Instead of our traditional 30 sec run / 45 sec walk, we went with a 30 sec run / 60 sec walk.

The results of the revised training were very interesting this week, to say the least.

First off, in our past sessions, I realized that I tend to pick up my pace when I'm run/walking on my own versus when the NH is with me.  My lap times were quicker when I was going solo, which I thought was really weird because he is traditionally faster than me in walking and running.  This week, the NH was walking on his own because my foot just wasn't having any of it.  So I would do strength training while he walked/ran solo around the track. 

He came up to me after the first time he did this and said, "So I found out something interesting.  If I walk at a really good clip, my times are *insert time here*." 

I kind of laughed at him and said, "That's really strange.  So you're walking faster by yourself than when I'm with you.  Which is weird because I did the same thing when I was walking solo."

So somehow - we hold each other back.  Which was a new and weird realization for the both of us.  We were both compensating our pace for the other person when it really wasn't necessary.  I think that has actually stuck with us, and we're going to hold on to that knowledge.

The other interesting thing came from adjusting our pace down to a 30 sec run / 60 sec walk.  We ran a solid 2 miles - no more, no less.  We weren't winded at the end, and we felt pretty darned good considering it had been forever since we'd done this!  Then I checked our time.

28 minutes and 43 seconds.  A 14:21 min/mile pace.  We were doing worse than that on some days that we were doing 30/45 second intervals.  Holy cow!

So the moral here is I think we're training all sorts of wrong, but hey - practice makes perfect.  We're making as educated of an attempt at this as we can, but we're still learning.  We've also decided we're going to stick with this pace for now, get back up to speed, and then we'll make a decision from there. 

All in all, though, we're pretty darned excited and back at it again!