Last Wednesday week saw me meet up with my running group for dinner and drinks to mark the end of our clinic. I ended up winning a prize. Not an award or anything, just a raffle prize, but the catch was that I had to come for a run this Wednesday to collect it.
Wednesday evening came around and it was pissing rain, but the lure of a freebie was too strong so I went along anyway. It turns out that the 10K clinic after us are at the stage where they have to do a 4km time trial, the same one I did about 10 weeks ago. This wasn’t what I wanted, as I think I have shin splints again, so didn’t want to run fast. However, while listening to the clinic’s pre-run seminar I decided I’d go for it and see if my shins held up.
We had a slow walk out to the start line – just enough time to realise that the rain was very heavy and it was pitch black. Just as well I’d done the route a few times before and knew there weren’t any serious obstacles to trip over. I took off and settled in to a reasonably quick pace. I didn’t have my HR monitor on, so I was going by feel. Once I got warmed up I realised that, between the rain, the dark, and my breath steaming them up, my glasses were useless, so I took them off and put them in my pocket. I was still worried that I was going to run into someone, or something, and take a nosedive but it never happened.
It was 2km out and back, and since I knew roughly where the 1km marker was as well, I decided to run steady until 3km and then build the pace (if I still could) to the finish. It worked out pretty well, and when I got past the rowing club it was a sprint for the line, which I crossed in 18:10. Ten weeks ago I did 20:29, and only 5 of those 10 weeks were decent quality training, so I was delighted to see that I’d dropped by pace by 35sec/km, or, to look at it another way, raised my speed by 1.5km/h!
I’m keen to continue running now until we leave Vancouver in five weeks, but I’ve got an appointment tomorrow morning with a doctor who specialises in running injuries, so I’ll wait to see what his verdict is on my self-diagnosed shin splints and take it from there.