15K

I woke at 5:15, ready to go, and hoping my foot would hold up. Last night I was anxious about this walk because of the GI problems last time, but this morning I was just ready to go. It was nice and warm at 50F (10C) but very, very windy - sustained 20mph winds with gusts harder than that, out of the south. Still, not bad weather. 50 and windy is quite tolerable; I wore long sleeves and tights with my gloves, but ditched the gloves about 5K and didn't need them after that. It's supposed to pour rain today, so I wore a baseball cap and tied my rain jacket around my waist just in case, as I didn't know when the rain was coming.

I started out well, and felt pretty good the whole walk. No GI trouble at all. Yay! Now if I could just figure out why sometimes I have trouble and sometimes I don't. Anyway, my first 5K with the downhill 2K from my house was 31:29, and then got to 10K in 1:03:55 for 32:26 for the second 5K. Then my legs got a bit tired, even though I was pretty fresh to start off with today. I'm just not quite back in the endurance mode yet. Still, the last 5K, including the slight uphill 2K, was 32:45, for a total of 1:36:41 (6:26/km) with ave HR 153.

Interesting note: I went around Liberty Park 5 times, because I wanted to stay reasonably close to home in case my foot hurt, and also near the bathrooms in case of GI trouble. During my 2nd time around I saw people setting up for a small race of some sort. On my 5th time around the volunteers cheered for me as I went by, so I stopped to ask what the race was and chatted for a few minutes. Turns out it was a low-key 5K for the Association for Clinical Pastoral Education, in town for a conference. I really enjoyed talking with them and we were all musing about how happy we were the rain held off for our workout/race. One of the women said, "How many times have you gone around the park? I saw you when we were setting up?". She seemed very impressed that I'd gone around 5x. I explained that I'm a bit crazy, as I'm training for the World Masters this summer. Then I was off on my way home, buoyed by the conversation. Sure wish I had some people to train with...sigh...

Garmin connect data here.