Best Workout Postpartum Thus Far

Why couldn't I have a postpartum running recovery in April with pretty weather? LOL. I've been tired of the cold and dark of my late night runs, so I've hit the elliptical the last two nights.  While fighting a cold, Saturday I ran 1.75 miles and logged 5.5 elliptical miles (45 min), and yesterday I logged 6 elliptical miles (50 min).  Add to that 15 minutes each of the last two nights of ab work.  So going into tonight's run, my legs, glutes, abs...everything was tired and a teensy bit sore.

So tonight's 4 mile run, with a bad head cold still mind you, began as "slow and steady let's try to run more continuously than I have yet postpartum" (which was 1.5 miles before I had to walk).  And somewhere it turned into a hard, hard workout. And one that I'm tremendously proud of and tells me a lot about my recovery so far and where my recovery is headed.  You can call it a ladder workout, intervals, tempo run, negative splits, I'm not a huge terminology buff about classifying workouts, so the point is it was an INTENSE workout and let's leave it at that.

I dragged my tired muscles along for 2.55 miles and then I turned it up a notch.  Splits...

2.55 miles - 12:51 pace ... turn it up
0.50 miles - 11:27 pace ... a little louder
0.25 miles - 10:53 pace ... what? you can't hear it?
0.10 miles - 10:03 pace ... can you hear me now?!?

No walk breaks between any of these intervals!  Note that my abs and C-section incision scar area were hurting once I sped up the pace, so I look forward to that going away over time as recovery continues.

I not only ran continuously for 3.4 miles, I got faster and faster and faster!  Which makes me wonder, what pace could I have run consistently for 3.1 miles? Could PRing the 5K not be TOO far down the road? (current PR is 10:20 pace)  Yes, my average pace was much slower than my 5K PR, but the summary here is that I obviously had gas in the tank at the end of this run.

Sorry to brag tonight on all this, and I know all of this seems trivial to someone running all the time and even more so possibly to someone who does that FAST, but I'm just insanely happy about my recovery so far and the hopes and dreams for 2011 running and racing!