April 2024 Training Summary
My very first month of consistent traing just wrapped up and there for it’s time for the April 2024 training summary. I will write these training summaries each month as a sort of accountability buddy and to document my journey. Hopefully, I will come back to this summary in one year from now and I’ll laugh about how bad I was.
Before I dive into numbers, I would like to share what were my goals entering my very first month of training concentrated on running.
- Familiarize my body with this type of activity
- Getting to know my body, the different cues it shows me
- Learning how to make decisions based on these cues
- Understand my pace zones and how to pace my effort according to the distance I want to run
Let’s now dive deeper into this April 2024 training summary.
General Achievements
From April 1 to April 22 I managed to complete 22 different activities:
- 14 runs
- 5 walks
- 3 rides
Why not only runs? Well, I am still at a point where I’m a little bit overweight and I think my overall goal right now is to keep losing weight and build up my endurance and stamina. To achieve this I think I need to get my body moving almost everyday. Runs are obviously my main focus, but I think it’s beneficial to have some active recovery during the “rest days”. Therefore I usually try to alternate runs with other efforts like walks or rides, performed at a lower intensity level.
Unfortunately, 3 out of the 4 weeks of April i was mostly traveling for work and due to my schedule it was not always possible to do this. That’s definitely one point I would like to improve whitin the next month.
Distance And Pacing
Over the entire month I ran 74.9 km, which means that I almost completed two marathons. I need to say that I’m very excited about this achievement. During my first runs I felt so bad that completing a 10k run seemed totally impossible to me. Yet I managed to run 10 km on two different occasions, while the 5km has become something like the standard distance that I can easily complete without walking or resting.
Here’s also a deeper look into my distance and pace evolution over April 2024.
I must say I’m quite pleased with the trends. The green dotted line shows the trend for my distance and pace during April. The distances I can cover have drastrically increased, completing two 10km runsin the last 8 days of April. My pace also got lower in absolute numbers, from a pace of 8:19 min/km to a pace of 6:29 min/km.
Pacing is a little bit relative, though. Because on longer runs I obviously go for a slower pace, while on shorter runs I consciously aim for a higher pace. When I run, my ultimate goal is to always try to run the entire distance without walking or resting. I’ll be very transparent and admit that for the 10km runs I’m not quite there, as I usually switch to walking for a few hundred of meters around km 8.
Goals For May 2024
On May 12 I will have my first race ever. When I signed up for it, it seemed impossible for me to have any other goal than just complete the race. That’s why I signed up for the 5.5 km race. In the end, that’s a very good decision. Let me explain why.
Looking at my progression, it’s clear that my goal for the race has changed. Now, I aim to complete the 5.5 km in less than 30 minutes. That still seems a little bit far away from what I can deliver right now, but I have 11 more days to train for this goal.
In the long run, this allows me to learn and understand pace management and also try some workouts specifically aimed to increase my pace. Like doing intervals. I think that’s the point when intervals actually make sense for me. I don’t think they are any useful in the first month of running, where the focus should be to get familiar with this activity and to know your body.
I also hope that the adrenaline of a race will give me a small bump so that I’ll be able to keep a better pace for a longer distance.
That’s pretty much it. How was your running in April?
Post Comment