3 miles/29:09

My first Portland Fit session was this morning.

What Portland Fit (and presumably USA Fit in general) do is to group runners according to their pace. Runners of similar speeds then do the same runs, rather than having everyone regardless of speed doing the same distance every week and having some folks finishing their run half an hour or more before the last.

Last year I started off running as a Red, which is the ten minute mile and slower running group, then moved up to Yellow (9-10 minute mile). However last year's initial group was based on my guess since I missed the first two sessions of the season with being on honeymoon.

Today was the second sign up session, and so I got to do a calibration run. This is running a set distance to see what your pace is. We were given very fiirm instructions to run at a pace where we could still carry on a conversation, a command which I more or less followed although the early part of the run was harder than it might have been since we'd been standing around for half an hour while we were introduced to the programme; I'd done my warm up and stretches before the seminar and I was a bit stiff by the time we got to actually run.

But I loosened up, and I feel comfortable that my time of 29:09 (9:43 per mile) is fair.

Now the training starts in earnest.

Posted by Dunx at April 3, 2004 02:31 PM