Running class was last Tuesday night, and it went really well. Thank god I could move from the Friday session, because not only would I have had to get up at 4.45am, I realised that when it finished, I would have had an hour to get to a train station, onto a train, to work and have a shower. Unlikely to happen, and I don’t want to make my workmates have to shuffle around their working hours just to accommodate my exercise insanity.

We met up at the entrance to the stadium and then had a quick warm up run of about a kilometre to a park nearby.  We are supposed to be training on the running track, but apparently after they’d launched the triathlon course session sign-up, they were advised that there would be junior WAIS athletics and Masters athletics on the track at the same time.  The run coach decided that they’d probably complain that we were interfering with their training sessions, so he decided to avoid all the grief he’d get, and move our sessions.  While I’d love to run on the track, if we keep working in the park I’ll be happy, because there are so many trees that when it was 30+ and humid at early evening, it was still lovely and cool for us. On the track we would have baked.

When we got to the park we all stretched out, and then did those quick dashes where you exaggerate your running movements.  The first one was fine, but my shin splint flared up during the one where you flick your shoes up high as if you were trying to touch your bum. Ow. I stopped immediately and then walked over to my stuff and quickly Voltaren (diclofenac) gelled the crap out of my shin while the rest of the people finished the warm up dash stretches bit.

At this point I will digress, and explain to you my collection of stuff.  I have a Road ID shoe pouch because I’d hoped that I could get away with running with just that and a water bottle.  I had my keys in the pouch but when my shin splints started up, I knew that I’d need the Voltaren gel too, so I had to have a bag. When I packed everything this morning I didn’t know how bad my shin splints would be, because the past three runs I’ve had to ice them when I finished, so I had grabbed two of the instant ice packs that I’d bought for Jeremy when he did the Gibb River Road Challenge. So I had a very funky orange bag full of stuff. Yay. Thankfully there were a few people who had enormous backpacks full of stuff, so it wasn’t so embarrassing, and I could squish down all the contents of the bag so that I could easily move around with it in one hand.

The only thing we were going to do in the first session was a time trial to see what speed we were and which groups we should go into. The time trial was set up like this: we were going to run along a 250m stretch of path, and loop back, so one full lap would be 500m, and we would run for 12 minutes.

Now, I’ve been doing Couch to 5K, and have been stuck on W4. Week four is a three minute run, a five minute run, three minutes and then five minutes again, with varying length walk breaks in between.  I’ve kept having to stop after the first two run intervals because my shin hurt too much, so in the time trial I expected that I’d have to walk at some point.

I started with the last group, just kept a very steady, possibly considered slow pace.  I had a song in my head, so I just ran out the beats of the song, but I did the full 12 minutes without stopping, without pain, and without any stitches. I was really pleased.

Once we’d finished that, we then did a run back to the stadium, and then did stretches on a patch of grass near the entrance. We learnt a few stretches that you really need to do with other people, so that you can really get into the stretch, so we were all paired up pressing on shoulders and working hip flexors.

I really enjoyed the session, and I feel really positive about running.