Consistent Running!

I'm REALLY happy with my consistent running since I started back after my injury in March. As I mentioned in Thursday's post, I attribute some of the "steadiness" of my virtual 10 mile race 2 weeks ago to this consistency.

I shared 2 graphs back in July that showed I was "coming back" from my injury. Now, I updated one of them. Since starting back to running in March, here's my pace of EACH of my runs in red, and the distance of my WEEKLY long run in blue leading up to the week before my race:

CLICK HERE for a larger version.

The gaps in the red pace graph are days that I did track workouts where your overall pace isn't fair to measure (where there's lots of time spent standing around while the clock is still ticking between intervals and what-not). Notice there were more breaks in the red to show interval workouts near the end of this graph - I had very consistent speed workouts every 2 weeks for the last 9 weeks of my 10 mile training.

The red drops quickly for the first 9 weeks or so, but then it stays more consistent.

You COULD look at the blue and think that I "built" too fast in the last few weeks, but what it really shows is my patience building my miles early on. I spent 8 weeks with a long run of 4-5 miles (with one of those barely breaking 5 near the middle of that stretch). EIGHT WEEKS. That's a long time to hold out there! Then ANOTHER EIGHT WEEKS of long runs of 5-6 miles. So in FOUR MONTHS, I worked my way up from 4 to 6 miles. That's S-L-O-W. And I'm proud of that. I was building my base.

I crossed the 6 mile threadshold in mid-July and had 5 longer runs before backing down for a week. Then 2 longer runs before backing down for another week. And finally 3 nice finally long runs with the last one breaking 11 miles!

Also (and maybe more importantly), I ran exactly 3x/week EVERY WEEK since I started back to running this past March. SUPER consisent there.