Personal Bests

It's all about personal bests.
Until very recently I didn't run.
At school I walked the cross country and took short cuts. The teachers couldn't monitor the whole class on a run.
Walking, now that I could do by the mile after unstoppable mile but never run.
When I first moved to Surrey, in my 40s, I joined a gym and enjoyed running on the tread mill. I could listen to podcasts and when I got tired I would still be right where I started.
I started street running in 2019, age 48. That biological clock telling me how I should stop taking my general good health for granted and start doing some work on it. But I wasn't logging the exercise, not recording times and distances.
Though I'd had step counters in the past it was getting a watch capable of tracking GPS that has helped most with the fitness tracking.
Step count is something I've covered in other posts and it's the simplest measure but what I'm getting interested in now is getting to a point where I can run 5km and once at that point I want to work on improving my times for that distance.
Towards the middle of last year I set up a spreadsheet which automatically pulls my step count from Google Fit and records it. While Google holds the data itself you have to use the mobile app to view the information and I want the flexibility to browse the information in different ways. The idea behind this was to get some base line numbers so that when I started exercising properly I'd have something to compare with. Exercising to start properly as I turn 49, with a goal to being fit for 50!
Just over a month into doing regular runs and despite the pandemic induced lock down, my running is getting better.
I started running Tuesdays and Thursdays. First I would walk to a local playing field then run two laps around it, then walk back.
When I went to run early one morning and found that the playing field was shut I opted to run the block around the playing field. Distance wise, running the street was just a little shorter than two laps of the field itself, about 2.5km.
About two weeks ago, rather than walking to the start of the run and walking back after it, I started running from the front door and finishing back at the house too. Just over 3km.
Last Sunday I chose to run a circuit that I'd walked several times as I knew this was just over 5km.
The circuit takes me down to the river, along the river then back up before a short run back down to home.
The climb starts at about 3km, roughly where I've been ending my regular runs. On this first attempt I didn't manage to run the full 5km, slowing to a walk at 4km then another run from the top of the road.
Despite not technically running the whole route it's given me a circuit time to beat, which I'll be trying again next weekend.
As well as giving an over all circuit time to beat the Strava site that I've been using to record each run has finally got some sensible distances to register some times with, these are my starting points:

1km - 5:52
1 Mile - 9:35
5km - 33:05

As mentioned above, the route isn't flat but it's one that I'll repeat so the distance is symbolic, though it will be interesting to see the time difference for 5km over different courses and as the weather changes.

Since I started using Strava I've run 45.6km over 14 runs, a total of 5 hours 46 minutes.

Lets see where we go from there.