A Little Experiment

Tuesday night, lying awake in the wee small hours, a thought that has been troubling me crossed my mind. Right back in the very beginning, what got me into doing the half-marathon followed on from my son talking on his blog about running at 7.5 mph - equivalent to a mile in 8 minutes. Now, I've been plugging away, and the best that I've got was 9 minute miles at the Delamere dash, which was a considerable improvement on the 11 minute miles that I'd managed the previous weekend. I've also been getting junk eMails inviting me to take up a free day pass to Fitness First. Light-bulb moment!
First thing Wednesday morning, I sign up for a day pass, and resolve to phone the number later when I've had a chance to work out when best to fit it in. An hour later, Wendy from Fitness First calls me - eager, or what! So, Wednesday, I turn up for my free session at 6 pm, and get shown around. I start on the treadmill - of course - gradually upping the speed until it reaches 12.3 kph, equals 7.6875 mph. It probably has a facility to show figures in imperial, but it was easier to do the maths than work out how to use a machine I'll probably never use again. Kept that up for about 20 minutes, and by then I was getting bored. A number of things combined, firstly, I couldn't keep going at the pace of the machine (the guy on the adjacent machine just kept going like an automaton - plod, plod, plod) - I kept having to speed up to catch up with it, then slow down as I overtook it, and all the time I was conscious of the video I'd seen of some guy who had obviously set it too fast, tripped, and ended up being shot off the back of the machine - ouch! The result of this was that I had to concentrate very hard on just staying on the road, not usually a problem on REAL road. I'd also just picked the first free machine that I saw, in front of which was a TV set showing some cycle racing. All that I learned from this was that guys with blue bums seem to go faster than anybody else (the picture was either an aerial shot of the field, from which you could tell nothing, or taken from a support vehicle that was just behind them - from which you got a good view of their best feature...) because the commentary was turned down so low that you couldnt' hear it. Perhaps if I'd taken more care to find a channel that interested me? I ended up clicking to "Cool down", and gradually slowed down with the machine, ending on a funereal 2.8 kph. All in, nearly 4 km in 24 minutes of extra exercise this week. Then I went into the weights room, and did a number of repetitions on various machines. All in all, a bit of fun playing with the different machines, and proof that I CAN run at 8 minute mile pace - just need another 11 miles at that speed and I'm home and dry!
Thursday's run was a repeat of that on Saturday, just over 4 miles. This time, I didn't feel as good as I did on Saturday (perhaps the extra session on Wednesday was taking its toll), but I did run it nearly 4 minutes faster. Again, encouraging progress.