Reaching a wall by not taking a rest day (new experience for me)

So I was real proud of myself for doing 12.5 km in a single day including one of them being a non-stop 10km jog that was a pretty decent pace. I was a bit irritated at myself for taking 4 walk breaks but other than that I was quite happy with myself for having done it.

Then yesterday I figured I would keep the torch alight by getting out there mid-day (the only time I had spare) and getting a mere 5k in. I figured this would be easy considering that I had done more than twice that much the day prior, but man oh man was it anything but.

Not that long ago, as I was working my way up to being able to somewhat easily doing 5k runs, I was quite proud of the fact that I was regularly doing this under 7 minutes per km. It was getting to the point that it wasn't really even all that difficult for me to accomplish this. But then I guess I got greedy because I wanted to go further, not faster. The idea here in my world was to be able to maintain a consistent pace over a longer period of time, not necessarily be really quick at a 5k. So I changed my strategy, as uneducated as it was, to go further, and I am still figuring that out and likely always will be.

The 5k that I did in the dead heat of the afternoon yesterday, was extremely difficult. I found myself getting angry that my watch wasn't vibrating to let me know that I had gone a km, then 2, then 3. Instead, I started to feel like I wanted to quit just after the first km

I'm no super athlete but you can see that my starting pace wasn't even that fast. Normally if I know I am only doing a 5k I can go a full minute faster than that. By km 3 the head games started happening and I desperately wanted to stop. By km 4, I had started walking a bit and well, when that happens to me I am very likely to remain in a walking position, especially if I am sweating like crazy and I also wasn't going to take my shirt off because I am shy and there were lots of people in the park that day.

heart rate management was pretty good although running in direct sunlight has many disadvantages and one of them was not being able to clearly see my watch. You can see the dips towards the end where I was basically completely gassed out and something else happened that hasn't happened to me ever, since I started converting from strength training to cardio: My legs ached.

So while I am no expert, I am a bit suspicious that I have not given my body enough time to recover and even though I couldn't feel it as I left the house and was actually very motivated to get out there and move, the legs had a different idea in mind where at a certain point they were basically screaming at me to stop it.

I can't believe that I am at a point now where I actually don't want to take rest days but perhaps I should do that. Today I will switch over to cycling instead because that is always easier for me but is still better than doing nothing.

I guess you could say that I am a bit proud because i've reached a point in my efforts where rest days apparently are necessary but also disappointed because in the grand scheme of things, 10k is not actually very far. Maybe I am being too hard on myself because I went from being the guy in the weight section of the gym that other people ask for advice, to being the guy on the running path that doesn't really know what the hell he is doing.

I don't know how long to rest for but my plan for today is to go cycling, then spend half an hour on my yoga mat afterwards doing some stretching while watching tv. This is another aspect of my fitness routine that I need to implement better. As someone who has done almost exclusively strength training in his adult life, stretching is something that I didn't ever really do. It was never necessary when chasing personal bests with the weights. Tightness of muscles meant that you were doing it right, now with running, I think the opposite is the case.

We'll see what happens but in the meantime you more experienced runners out there, let me know your thoughts.