Doing worse than you thought

I thought this whole time that I was running my 3 mile lap in about 30 minutes. Turns out it’s actually 40 minutes. Let me unpack the story.

There is this path I run that is 1.5 miles each way. When I get to the end of it, I make a U-turn on the spot, go back the same way and complete the rest of 1.5 miles.

When I first ran one way, it came out to be 16 minutes.

16 times 2 is 32, so at this rate, it should mean that my 3 mile running time is 32 minutes which is close to 30 minutes. That’s great!

But I’ve never ran both ways without stopping. I usually run one way continuously and walk when I hit the half point to give my body a bit of rest.

I’ve never ran both ways without stopping until today.

I started running at 7:54pm. I got to the half way point at 8:11pm. I completed the 3 mile stretch at 8:33pm.

That’s 39 minutes total.

If I do a bit more breakdown, it seems like I was running roughly 11.3 minutes per mile before the half way point and then 14.6 minutes per mile after the half way point. I really slowed down a lot in the second half. My right knee hurt the more I ran, and I was worried I was injuring myself. I didn’t want to obsess over making a certain time goal. I just wanted to keep up the endurance. But now that I measure my time and see it in front of me, I’m starting to be more self-conscious about it after all.

I will say that this path is quite hilly, so it requires a lot of adjusting how I run based on the slope up and down and managing physical exertion. I wonder if my time would be better if I ran somewhere that was completely flat the whole time.

Anyhoo, It’s a little sad to know that I was doing worse than I thought. But I am very glad to know that I was doing worse than I thought and documenting it so that I know what’s going on and what I can do about it.

Isn’t that just grand!