My Journey With Weight Loss – Am I Getting Faster?

The weather seems to be slowly getting warmer and though we have had some rain this week (very normal for this time of year), I still managed to get several runs in down at the beach. I just find it so calming to run along the promenade first thing in the morning especially when the tide is in and the water is calm. That is until Thursday when I realized oh no, they are back! Yes, the terrifying Canada geese are back in town. I also realized that dammit, soon it will be gosling season and they will become even meaner. Sigh, at least their presence may help with my sprint training as I run as fast as I can to get past and as far away from them as possible.

I woke up this morning and noticed the muscles around my left shoulder blade were sore possibly because I tossed and turned most of last night. I checked my readiness score on my Fitbit and it’s sliding a bit into fair instead of good or excellent. I decided I should back off a bit as I have done some form of HIIT (high intensity interval training) 5 days in a row and the past 2 days I had done an awful lot of running/walking. As it was raining I hit the treadmill and started off in a comfortable jog.

I wasn’t quite 1/2 way into my run when I noticed my back muscles had loosened up and I was feeling pretty good. Then that voice in my head started talking to me and said you really want to waste your training streak this week? You can do this, just one set of HIIT. So, I did the usual 5 1 minute fartleks but for some reason I decided to just keep going into a 2nd set of 5 and at the end I felt pretty good. 6 consecutive days of intense training and I have lived to tell about it.

Afterwards I did the same thing I do after every workout, used my Fitbit to analyze what I had done. Much to my shock, today was the slowest I have run in a long time. I couldn’t believe it, I’ve been working really hard and I only have 3 months until I need to be in my absolute top form. How could I have gone backwards like this?

Then it hit me, sore muscles combined with a lagging recovery readiness and today my body was sending me a message that I tried to ignore so it overrode my intended training. Yes, I felt I was pushing it hard and by time I was done I was drenched in sweat. But really my body only let me do what it knows I can physically do today. I look at it as my body protecting itself and if that is the case then it is a good thing to have gone a bit slower today.

I’ll be honest, while my speed was disappointing today if I look at the overall performance I am getting a little bit faster each week. I’m able to do up to 3 sets of sprints during my runs and while they can be hard they are in no way debilitating. I’ve still got about 12 weeks and if my speed continues to increase each week I will easily be able to finish the 1/2 marathon in plenty of time.

So yes, I am getting faster and plan to continue to do so though will pay a little more attention to the clues my body is sending me so that I can get to that end goal safely.