Over the past few months I have chronicled my injury, with some sad posts, hopeful, and maybe a bit frustrated. Here’s a happy one. I have built up gradually in 2020, starting with just 1.5 miles on the first week of the year to 28 miles ending last week. However, rather than counting miles I have been going by minutes, and that has helped me hold back. So last month it was five days a week for 20-25 minutes a run, and now at the end of this month I have built to 40-50 minutes–with a big jump to 62 minutes on my birthday last week.
In that run I managed to score a personal worst for a 5K race, with a 19:50. Nevertheless, it was a good run. The plan was to go 6:30, 6:20, 6:10 but I did quite the opposite. The first kilometer (downhill) was probably closer to 6:10 pace, but once I got onto the bike path I settled more into 6:20s pace, hanging into the top 10 or 12 (half of them women). It felt good, like a tempo, with a heretofore 23 mile peak week I figured this would not be sustainable for a 5K, and I was right.
6:19 first mile.
The second mile was just a matter of pacing and finding that rhythm. At the turn around on the bike path I felt my stomach coming up. Not great.
12:47 at 2 mile
I surged some after about 2.2 miles but could not hold more than 20 or 30 seconds, and it was much of a surge. With 600 to go we had a 200 m hill, nothing huge but it wasn’t pleasant feeling.
19:15 at 3 mile and ambled into the finish.
That’s probably 40 seconds slower than my slowest (and those were slightly long courses), but I crossed and cooled down pain free. Awesome.
And now I have a baseline from which to work. After this week I’ll also start building by miles (about 5 mile increments every two weeks to start), and go from there.
rrunnin234 
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