Baby Steps

I've been pretty religiously sticking to my back-to-running-plan so far. Last week I was at 3 minute walk + 1 min run by which at the end of 45 minutes I covered on average 4.5km of which the distance run was approximately 1.6km. Now its time to level up. 

Level up as per my original plan = 3 min walk + 1.5 min run. And I'm not feeling entirely sure of this. I’ve spent a considerable amount of time on my return to running plan and some weeks it gets subjected to a few tweaks based on how I’m doing. In the interest of gradual progress, I’ve altered the plan now, whereby I'm going to stay at the 1 min run interval but reduce the walk interval to 2 minutes. This would give me a few more weeks to get to the phase where I’m running more than I’m walking. 

My concern with the original plan was that over the course, it had me reducing the walk interval while increasing the run interval at the same time. From week to week, it was a big jump in the total distance run during the 45 minutes. Now I feel I should drop the walk interval down to 1 min before starting to increase the run intervals. It may mean taking things even slower but cautious is definitely better than sorry!

Returning to Running

2 weeks since I've "officially" begun running again. Its a slow process and one that I have to be patient with. Two weeks ago, I started with 50 meters of running thrown in at regular intervals during my 45 minute walk. This week and last, I increased that to 100 meters. I take about 30-40 seconds to complete the 100 meters so it's by no means close to what my speed intervals used to look like. 

In 45 minutes, I cover 8 rounds of the walk+run combo which brings my running distance to 800 meters. Pre-injury, I was running about 6.5k in 45 minutes (without much of a break in between) so I am sure you can appreciate when I say that this is truly a test of my patience. :) But if this injury has taught me anything, it is patience. And I have wised up to the fact that there is nothing to be gained by rushing things. (Harking back to rushing my 20-miler training which is what caused me this whole ordeal in the first place) 

So slowly and steadily, I'll take my baby steps up to week 10 and further and hopefully, I'll get back to my pre-injury pace stronger and in better form than before.