It didn’t go so well. It turns out the longish gap since my last run (4 days), combined with 16 hours of flights, a mild stomach bug, moderate dehydration caused by the general hotness of the world and aforementioned stomach bug and the fact my last run was a half marathon distance meant I was a little stiff and slow getting started this morning.

Things didn’t start well when Runkeeper couldn’t get a GPS lock this morning – rather than having the dulcet tones of the Runkeeper automated trainer kicking off my running this morning I kicked in with some tunes and tried to do song-length intervals. This lasted all of 3 minutes, at which point Runkeeper kicked in and I realised that my hope of doing 3minutes ‘fast’ (5.30ish splits per km) and 2 minutes ‘steady’ (6m30ish splits per km) on rotation was a bit, well, optimistic. I forged on through the first half of the 5k run, my knees thankfully not causing me any issues whatsoever despite yesterday’s concerns, at a reasonable (if not quick) split of about 6m16 per km on average, and then it dialled back to about 6m30 by the time I finished the run.

Whilst my knees caused no problems, my left shin (which has never really given me problems in the past) stayed stiff most of the way through the first 4.5km, only beginning to loosen up towards the end. Am giving it a good stretch today and will try another gentle run tomorrow (and hopefully intervals again on Thurs) before a couple of LSRs this weekend in an attempt to restore normality.

Run record (edited to make up for Runkeeper GPS issues) is here.