Ran about 3.3 miles in about 38 minutes. I’m actually confident that both of those numbers are accurate. Perhaps the first TRULY accurate numbers I’ve had so far. That’s a pace of 11:25, which is way higher than my last two runs, but I can tolerate it. I started the run feeling pretty tired to begin with. I’m not particularly sure why. My legs were just wimpy when I started running, and the result was that I didn’t recover during the walking sections as well as I would have liked to have done. Part of the reason for this is that today is a bright and sunny day, easily the warmest since my first run. Thanks to at least a drizzle during each run, I stayed reasonably cool. Today I was breathing pretty heavily after only about a mile.
Now, I took the day off yesterday, largely because I had run the two days previous, even though I wasn’t feeling particularly sore or tired. So, after 48 hours rest, I didn’t have the all-conquering (ya know, for me) that I was expecting or hoping for. Now, as has already been shown, I don’t know anything. So, I Googled the subject of improving recovery times for runners. The second article, for me, talked about tapering your running before a race to improve your rested-ness, and thus, your time. It also included this tidbit:
Research has shown that tapering effectively improves race performance by 3% to 5%. This means that a good taper can shave 5% off your finish time. When you consider that any one workout will give you less than 1% improvement in fitness, it is wise to err on the side of too long a taper rather than too short a taper. Depending on your race distance you should taper from seven days (for example, 5Ks) to three weeks (for marathons).
Now, obviously, “fitness” is an pretty ambiguous term, and I have no idea how the author is defining it. If I’m 10% more fit in a month than I am today, does that mean I’ll run 10% faster? Less than that? More? Plus, there’s an issue of diminishing returns. I imagine that my half dozen runs over the past 9 days are worth much closer 6% than Haile Gebrselassie’s last six runs are. Hell, my last six might be worth over 6%, given how unfit I’ve been, and it’s entirely likely that most of Gebrselassie’s running sustains his fitness, rather than increases it. The statement doesn’t take into account the quality or the workout, either. Is my half hour run enough? Or do I need to run farther, or add some crunches and weight lifting for it to count?
It is nice to think about, though, if I keep running 4-5 times per week for the next 48 weeks, I could be a solid 200% fitter than I am now. Whatever that means.
