The good old-fashioned training wisdom is that you need to include rest days in your programme. So, when I embarked upon the crazy scheme to run 10K every day during the month of June, the question I needed to answer was this: “Would the lack of rest days have a negative impact on my fitness, or would all this exercise make me better and faster?”
To test this to the full I had two races last week; the 5K Canal Run on Tuesday (just two days after the end of my challenge) and a 10K on Friday (the St Aidans 10K). I wasn’t holding out much hope for the 5K but after a few days rest, the 10k might be interesting.
What I wasn’t prepared for was how well I performed in both races. In the Canal Run I was amazed to finish a smidge under 23 minutes, a goal that had escaped me last year! The last time I had done better than that was back in 2011! As for the beautiful St Aidan’s 10K my best time on that had been 51 minutes which I set last year. This year I set a goal to get under 50 minutes and managed 49:07, almost 2 minutes faster than last year.
Is this just a load of self indulgent bragging? Could be, but there’s an important lesson here. For me at least, loads of mileage does lead to faster times so while I AM going to have rest days going forward (it’s pretty grim having to do running every day), I’ll keep the mileage up and see where it leads.
“Do not boast about tomorrow,
for you do not know what a day may bring.”
Marathon Mann 