back to the group

running with other people is far different than running alone.

The Bet Shemesh Running Club began marathon training season this week. While at this point I have not committed to running a marathon, I have decided I would train to the best of my ability, marathon or not. Training with the group is a big help in improving my fitness and my running - especially for the speed workouts and probably for the long runs.

When I run myself, I have to push myself. I often do, but not too hard. I am also listening to podcasts or whatnot, and I am not focusing on my running all that much. Running with other people is far different. We are chatting a bit, when possible, but mostly keeping each other going and reminding each other of the pace and the timing, offering words of encouragement and praise. And, especially, there is a bit of a competitive nature in all of us, and when running with other people there is a natural boost in your step.

Tonight I ran the speed workout with the group. The first speed workout of the season was a fartlek. Fartlek is basically running 4 cycles of twelve minutes each, with each 12 minutes broken into 3 segments of 4 minutes. Each segment of 4 minutes is run at a different speed - slow, medium and fast, and then all over again for a total of 4 cycles - plus a 2km warmup and a 2km cooldown (which was shortened tonight).

Not really knowing my marathon pace, which is how to determine the different speeds for the fartlek, I ran with two other guys at paces of 6:30, 6 and 5:30. While it was difficult to keep to the porogram accurately, overall we were pretty close.

I ended up running just under 10km at an average pace of 6:01mpkm.

A big problem I had was I could not get the fartlek program into any of the apps I tried for tracking, and to alert me of the time to change pace. I ended up using two apps which were not synced so it got confusing, and neither had the correct info for the fartlek, but at least the timing was pretty close so I knew when I was approaching the 4 minute mark , even if I did not know the exact pace I was running at. For that I had to rely on my running partner's occasional updates when they were with me.

Maybe I'll eventually figure something out, or maybe I'll get a new GPS watch that makes the tracking easier and more accurate, or maybe I'll just continue to rely on other people. Whatever happens, the run tonight was great. It is really good to be running with other people again


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