Week 3

One thing you learn to appreciate as a runner is the importance of style. Running efficiently helps you feel more comfortable on the road, reduces the risk of injury and, of course, allows you to run faster without expending extra effort. It also has the benefit of making you look and feel like less of a twit. You actually have the sense, when things really 'click', of speeding along the pavement, nimbly ducking such obstacles as puddles, potholes and oncoming buses.
Conversely, when I start out on a training cycle I'm hideously aware of the ugliness of my running. It goes through a series of stages. The first I call bum-shuffling. Mercifully, I don't really do this any more, but it's that foot-dragging, hip-swivelling, torturous method of progress that is common in middle-aged women who take up the sport.
As things develop, I reach the stage known as bus-stop running. This is the marginally more coherent, arm-flailing, buckle-legged form of motion that's distinguished (if that's the word) by heavy breathing. It means the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. This is the really painful stage, when a two-mile run up and down a gentle incline can have me wheezing like a 40-a-day smoker.
After a few weeks things start to settle in to some kind of rhythm. The pace is still slow, the feet feel like bricks every time they touch the ground, and even slight hills feel vertiginous, but I've subdued the gasping rebellion of my lungs and am fit enough to run at an even tempo for an hour or so. This is more or less the stage I feel I've reached at the moment. The next stage is the "comfort zone", when I'm running close to my optimum pace, gliding across pavements, flagging slightly in the later stages but still feeling fresh at the end. And finally - very rare this - comes something approaching mastery of my own limbs. I remember fondly a training session when I decided to run fast but steady for the first three miles, before stepping up a gear for the last four. The result: I kept pace with my personal best through the first section, then gritted my teeth and annihilated it in the second phase. Moments like this are what I do all the hard, unforgiving miles for.
Sometimes the switch can come unexpectedly, even in the middle of a run. It happened this week, towards the end of a sluggish four-miler. I had to dash across the traffic lights about three-quarters of a mile from home, and once I got to the other side I just kept going. It was as if something had pushed me in the back. My step fell lighter, my knees kicked higher and I felt the exhilarating sense of all cylinders firing in synch for the first time in months. I picked up 20 seconds in that part of the run alone (which offset a shortfall on the rest of the run).

Runs completed: 4.2 miles; 6.1 miles; 7.1 miles miles
Week's mileage: 17.4
Total mileage: 46.4
Shoe mileage: Saucony 38
Fitness level: 70%