Back to Training

I had my two weeks of almost complete rest following the Mountainman, if you count a couple of easy paced 5 mile runs as rest, and last week it was time to pick up the training again.  On Tuesday I had a rare evening off so I went for a 9 mile run around Cambridge with two old running friends, Suzy and Jamshid.  The two of them picked a couple of long straight sections of road were we picked up the pace for a mile or so.  It felt good to be running fast again and I was pleased with how my legs felt.

Wednesday was Sweaty Betty running club night.  I got the girls to do 8 x 40 second sprints, followed by a relay race where each girl had to run four sprints in a team of three, i.e. girl 1 tags girl 2, who then tags girl 3, who then tags girl 1 again, which is then repeated until each girl has run 4 legs.  I found myself having to take the place of one girl to cover her last leg as she developed a slight muscle pull on her third leg (her third relay leg, she's not  a mutant with three legs!).  The team I had to help out were in 4^th place, but I managed to get them into the lead from my single leg.  I know, I shouldn’t brag.

I had intended on doing about a six mile run on Friday, but got caught up in doing admin.  Plus it wasn’t a particularly nice day, so I didn’t feel too bad about missing a run.  Yesterday I returned to Milton Country Park to run in the Cambridge Parkrun.  It’s been four months since I last ran a 5k Parkrun.  I wasn’t expecting anything too quick, and I deliberately started further back in the pack than usual.  I always get a lot more nervous at the start of a Parkrun than for any other distance I run.  I don’t know why this is.  I’ve thought about it many times and try to tell myself that my nerves are completely irrational, but it never helps.  As soon as we’re off I feel fine.  I focus on settling into a nice steady pace for the first 500m, then I start to pick out a few runners ahead of me and decide who I am going to target to catch – if anyone.

Yesterday I told myself I was just going for a steady run around with the aim of finishing in about 20 minutes.  There was a 20 minute pace maker in the pack, so I thought I’d stick just a little ahead of him.  Of course, as soon as we were running my usual competitive impulses kicked in and I couldn’t help overtaking runners ahead of me.  I was very happy to finish in a time of 18 minutes 33 seconds, ninth place overall out of about 350 runners, and the first man over 40.  My time was a minute slower than my PB, so I need to start working on getting that little bit of speed back.  Hopefully I can now start adding some speed work back into my training.  This has been missing recently as I’ve been mainly focusing on the mileage. 

I have a couple of other runs already booked for the rest of this year, but I won’t be taking either too seriously.  Next weekend I will be running in the Grafham Water marathon.  And in November I’ll be running in the three day Druid Challenge, which covers 89 miles of the Ridgeway Path from Ivinghoe Beacon in Buckinghamshire to Swindon in Wiltshire.  I will hopefully also run a marathon in October and quite possibly the Portsmouth marathon in December.  Watch this space.

As Grafham Water marathon is just next week I decided to go for an 18 mile run today.  In an ideal world I should have done a long run last weekend, but I didn’t quite feel up to it.  I perhaps didn’t need to do a long run at all.  It could be taken for granted that I have plenty of endurance fitness in the system, given the recent ultras that I’ve run, but I felt like getting one long run in just to test the legs.  Thankfully, my legs felt pretty good.  I’ll be resting tomorrow and then probably doing some fast 1 mile repeats on Tuesday.  I’ve said it, so now I’d better get out and do it.