Blake Bennions running

Ran over to the track and park for a long run. There was a very light rain for most of the run today, it felt pretty good. I took the first 5 miles pretty easy, 4 of them were on the grass. It's about a 2 mile loop around the field at the park next to my house, which will be even nicer to make use of when its less muddy.

After the firt 5 I did a few marathon pace miles and a 5k pace mile. For the 5k pace mile I tried to keep it to a pace I was confident I could do a 5k in my current shape and didn't push beyond that, I was hoping for 5:45 but ended up going 5:56. I'll do a 5k and try and run 5:56/mile or faster next weekend. A sub 1:20 HM is certainly beyond my current fitness, but we'll see how I'm feeling after a couple more months of 20-40 mile weeks.

Easy treadmill run to get to 100 miles for the month. Tomorrow I'm planning on doing a 5x1000m workout with a goal of 3:30 per k and a quarter mile jog recovery between reps. Hopefully this time next year I'll be doing this workout at 3:05-3:10.

Looking back at 2018 and 2020 it seems like I was able to get into better shape a lot quicker than I can now. I think part of it is that I just need to get used to running faster paces again and do some faster speed workouts. What's important is that I've been able to reliably keep my achilles healthy and am confident I can keep that up. Avoiding faster speed workouts also might be a big part of whats keeping my achilles healthy, but I'm going to start testing that a bit. One step at a time.

2 mile warm up to the track

5x1000m at 5k pace with 600m recovery between reps. I was shooting for 3:30 but I ended up going 3:22, 3:19, 3:29, 3:22, 3:25. So an average of 3:23 and on pace for just under 17 minutes. A good amount faster than I was planning on, not going to complain about that. Hopefully this summer I'll be able to run a 5k under 17 minutes!