Week 7 - In which Thursdays are recommended for disposal

Miles so far this week: 7
TOTAL MILES: 172

Wednesday 16^th Feb – Interval day! (1mile warmup, 4x 1m at 7m30 pace, 1 mile warmdown)

Show me the map!

This run should have been yesterday, since Tuesday is interval day.  However, due to the fact that I am now happily affianced, some celebration was in order.

Wiser men than me would declare that drinking alcohol the day before a hard run is a bad idea.  Happily, I am not among these men.

The run itself was safely dispatched well within the times allowed, continuing my run of over-performing.  The hope for this is to put something in the bank, as it were, for the marathon itself.  We’ll see how well that works in a month or two when the training gets even more “fun” than it is now, but for now I’m happy to do it.

It’s actually a nice run, this, as it incorporates quite a hilly section of Chineham Business Park as well as some flats.  A good mix, there, which will hopefully pay off further down the line.

Nothing of note to mention, with regard to the left leg.  The Achilles is still grumbling, but not seriously so, and the calf is still performing perfectly well.  I’m beginning to think that it was more the temperatures of a couple of weeks ago that played a part in the eventual problems rather than anything more serious. I still treat it gently for the first half a mile or so, but I suspect that this is more mental than physical.  Certainly, tonight when I sped up, there was no pain.

Miles so far this week: 18
TOTAL MILES: 183

Thursday 17^th Feb – 11 miles at 9m30 pace

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In terms of the runs over the last couple of weeks, this rates as the worst of them in terms of pain.  I started the run late (9pm, in fact) and hadn’t eaten since lunchtime.  Couple that to a 2 hour shopping trip beforehand, which affected the legs more than I’d realised, and it’s clear to see that there are perfectly good reasons as to why this run did not go according to plan.

Now, that said, it’s worth noting that I finished this run at an average of 8m37.  That’s nearly a minute-per-mile quicker than the designated schedule pace for tonight, so despite the pain caused, I can’t really complain.  Yes, it hurt, but despite it hurting, I was, pretty much, at my marathon pace for 11 miles in which the preparation had been, for want of a better word, crap.

Clearly I’m trying to put a positive spin on what was an unpleasant run, here, but ultimately I finished it and in a pretty decent pace, so it’s hard to knock it too much.

Miles so far this week: 23
TOTAL MILES: 188

Friday 18^th Feb – 1 mile warmup, 3 miles at 8m00 pace, 1 mile warmdown

Show me the map!

I’m beginning to dislike Thursdays.  Thursday is the new Tuesday, and I don’t like it.  Yes, this is Friday, but it’s a day late and so it is, in reality, a Thursday in Friday’s clothing.

I think my problem with Thursday is that it is – or appears to be - eminently useless.  Tuesday is interval day, Wednesday is a longish run at close to race pace and Sunday is the Very Long Run.  Thursday is the fly in the ointment; the irritating younger brother ripping the last page out of your books for the hell of it; the 25-stone man in Greggs that took the last 6 sausage rolls when you were behind him and in desperate need of a pastry-wrapped piggy.

Or, if you’re Alanis Morissette, it’s ironic for some completely non-ironic reason like dying on your first plane flight.  Either way, it ain’t irony, and I’m still starving thanks to the fast bastard in Greggs.

And what of the run itself?  What of this completely non-ironic irritant of a day?  Well, it went very well indeed.  I was significantly quicker than needed, and finished strongly, with enough energy to have kept going if necessary.  I didn’t, though.  15 miles were coming up again on Sunday and I didn’t want to push any harder than I had.

Miles so far this week: 38
TOTAL MILES: 203

Sunday 20^th Feb – 15 miles (first 7 miles in 9m30, remaining 8 miles in 8m30)

Show me the map!

I enjoyed this run.  It was hard, since I’d been drinking the night before and felt ever so slightly hungover, but nonetheless, I was out of bed at 8am and ready to run by 9am.

The beautiful fiancée had made my drink for me and supplied the gels that were to get me through the day and so, with a fond farewell, I stepped into the cold, crisp Basingstoke morning and, with the merest wisp of rain in my face, set off towards Chineham Business Park.

From the house, it is approx. 3 miles to the top of Chineham Business Park, where you can pick up a road that takes you out and left, into the wilderness towards Bramley.

Interestingly enough, almost all the way to Bramley is uphill.  I was quicker than the time expected, but not by a great deal, due to the uphill nature of the thing.  Once in Bramley proper, I headed West and toward The Vyne.

The halfway point was reached, and I duly turned around and came back.  Surprisingly, a lot of the way back was uphill; Escher would have been proud.

At any rate, I got back to Chineham Business Park at the accelerated rate with a slight problem – I’d managed to forget that it was 8 miles on the way back, leaving me with a surplus mile.  What to do?  Well, luckily, there is a partial loop of the CBP that is approximately one mile around.

The not-so-lucky part of this tale is that half of this loop is quite steeply uphill and there I was at the near-on 13 mile mark feeling a little leggy.  Still, heroics were performed, crowds gathered, men nodded approvingly, children watched with hushed awe and women openly wept at the manliness on display.

The upshot of placing this hill in the last few miles was that the final flat mile was one of the easiest in the whole run, since my legs were just thankful not to be going uphill for once.

The calf continues to be no problem at all, and the Achilles, while slightly painful, is grumbling less and less as the miles go by.  My knee cap now hurts on my left leg, but since it is neither muscle nor tendon, I really don’t care at this point, since it isn’t hurting enough to bother me.

Good times!

Week 6 - In which I bounce back again and learn about the Highway Code

Miles so far this week: 4.5
TOTAL MILES: 131

Tuesday 8^th Feb – Interval day! (1mile warmup, 15 x 200m at 7m30 pace, 1 mile warmdown)

Show me the map!

Right!  A week’s break, some much needed rest for the poor li’l left peg and a positive attitude.  What could possibly go wrong today?  Well, intervals, for a start.  They aren’t the most gentle of activities on the legs, and here’s me with a dodgy one.  Still, I was once told that you have to be in it to win it, so I dutifully got my trainers on and stepped outside once more.  (In the interests of disclosure, I should point out that I was also once told when I was about 7 that if you dreamed that you’d died in your sleep, you died in real life.  I accepted this without hesitation and spent the next 5 years of my tiny life terrified of dreaming about falling. Eventually my dad, that all-conquering hero of common sense, pointed out that if this really were the case, how would anyone ever know?)

So, back to the run.  Glorious.  Fearless.  Heroic.  Triumphant.  All good words, none of which could be used as an adjective to aptly describe how I approached this run.  Tentative, on the other hand, is perfect – more specifically, its sibling adverb.  I tentatively set out, and then I tentatively did my warmup mile, before tentatively testing the water with the first couple of sprints.  There was a little strain on the calf, but no real pain.  Certainly not the razor-sharp pain of last week, at any rate.

Feeling slightly more confident, I sped up a bit – sprinting a little faster, jogging between sprints rather than walking, that sort of thing - and bit by bit I got back up to full pace.

At the end, walking through the front door, the Achilles felt a little sore, but nothing like as much as the previous week.  The calf, on the other hand, was not grumbling at all, and so the week off did what it had needed to do.

Still, this was only the first run back.  Tomorrow would give us more information on how that leg was going to hold up.

Miles so far this week: 14.5
TOTAL MILES: 141

Wednesday 9^th Feb – 10 miles, 9m30 pace

Show me the map!

During my enforced absence, I’d managed to miss a 13 mile at pace run.  This essentially meant a 13 mile run at around the 8 minutes per mile pace.

That would have been a tough test, and so I decided to emulate it here.  True, it’s only 10 miles, rather than 13, but it’s the pace that would count.  Could I maintain an average of around 8 minutes a mile over the (almost full) distance?

I planned this in advance, and so the iPod contained naught but inspiring music today.  It was time to Feel the Steel.

So I set off and immediately got down to sub-8m miles.  The first mile felt fine, and so did the second.  It was only then that I realised I was following my “short runs” path.  Having left the house without any real plan or direction, I’d simply started following my faster route on auto pilot, leading me to the precarious position of being perched on the Chineham Business Park roundabout without a destination!

As always in these situations, the answer was found by utilising an inspirational phrase (quote: “sod it”) and randomly choosing a direction.  And that’s how I found myself running the wrong way up the A33 in pitch black darkness, without a torch.

I was wearing my fluorescent vest, though, which was causing difficulty for oncoming cars.  Several of them took a couple of seconds to realise that yes, there was an idiot coming towards them with nothing more significant in the lights department than a fluorescent vest.

Finally, in a late nod to safety, I illuminated the fascia on my Garmin.  That 2 inches of blue light made a difference, but not in a good way.  Instead of drivers noticing me at the last minute before swerving, I was now seemingly hypnotising them with my rhythmically swaying blue light into coming closer.  The effect was much like waving one of those blue donut-fly-killing thingies and finding a 2-ton mosquito heading in for a closer look.

It could well be that this heightened level of danger is what caused me to finish the 10 miles in an average of 7m58.  That, or the week off.

Either way, the important part is that I finished strongly and could easily have done another 3 miles at this pace.

I learned a lot in this run.  I learned that, despite my misgivings and self-doubt, I am actually able to do the pace I need to do at this point of the training.  I also learned to plan ahead.  More importantly, though, I learned that major A roads are not the place to be without a torch.

Miles so far this week: 20.5
TOTAL MILES: 147

Thursday 10^th Feb – 1 mile warmup, 4 miles at 8m30 pace, 1 mile warmdown

Show me the map!

A nice, easy run, this.

For starters, I looked at a map. And lo, there was a road that ran in a roughly parallel direction to the A33 but with a slightly Western flavour.  (the direction, I mean.  It’s not like the road was herding cattle whilst nodding to passers-by with a friendly “howdy.”)

The road was certainly safer at night, by dint of the presence of street lights and paving.  It did get much darker further on, at the point where civilisation had seemingly deemed itself content and packed up and gone home.  But up to that isolated point, it was a perfectly good road to run on.

The run went well, and all times were easily achieved.  The leg started to complain today, but to be fair, it had stood up to a hard-ish week admirably well and it’s no surprise to find that it was finally starting to grumble.  This was the last run before a rest day, though, so it would have its wish of a rest.

Miles so far this week: 23.5
TOTAL MILES: 150

Saturday 12^th Feb – 3 miles at 9m30 pace

Can’t find the map for this one

Not much to say about this really, other than that since I started this schedule, this is the first run I had outside of Basingstoke City Limits.

The reason for this was because I needed to find a hill that was at least 2 minutes of running time long, with a reasonable degree of difficulty.  Luckily, I knew one near to where I work, so off I did trot and came back an hour later completely knackered.  Hill training is fun, but NOT FOR KIDS!

Miles so far this week: 38.5
TOTAL MILES: 165

Sunday 13^th Feb  – 15 miles at 8m56 pace

Show me the map!

Today was the second 15 mile run in my running career.  Considering the damage the first one had done (Achilles and calf) I wasn’t looking forward to it.  I did, however, have a secret weapon...

An ankle support!  With this puppy in my armoury how could I possibly fail?!

So I had an idea of where I wanted to go, since me and the beautiful fiancée had gone to a carvery a couple of weeks back.  I wasn’t planning on stopping for a meal at the halfway point, but I did like that the road seemed to be more “country” than “town”, in terms of the view and since I like to look at the countryside, I figured I’d give it a go.

If you look at the map, though, you’ll see that to get to the countryside, I had to go through Basingstoke town centre.  I’d liken it to Dante’s trip from hell (Basingstoke town centre), through purgatory (Worting), to heaven (the countryside!) but I saw no sign of the devil munching on Judas at Festival Place which, for men at least, is surely the 9^th level of hell.

By the time Worting was disposed of, I only really had about 3 miles of countryside to go, before having to turn around and come back.  It did, however, allow me to get to the pub, as, by happy coincidence, the halfway point of my run was approximately 200yds from its door.

There was a moment of debate as both hemispheres of my brain discussed the merits of a halfway pint.  The legs (who weren’t invited to the discussion but popped in anyway to voice their dissent) were of the opinion that a pint would make the 7 and a half mile journey back home somewhat more painful than they needed to be.  Also, the idiot in charge had forgotten his wallet and so the argument was moot.

So, having been insulted by my own legs, the journey home continued.

Nothing of note happened on the way back health-wise, but I did manage to pass by a police car in the process of blocking off a piece of pavement with nothing of note in it.  Another couple of men stood nearby, chatting.  They were plainclothes, but had the walkie-talkies, so I assume that these guys were essentially CSI: Basingstoke.  They weren’t doing much, though, so I carried on home.

So after the injury fears of last week, this week was fine.  Things hurt at various stages, but nothing felt anywhere near as bad as it had the week before.  I’m not sure if the pain will return, but for now I’ll stay quietly confident.

Week 5 - In which injury strikes!

Miles so far this week: 6.4
TOTAL MILES: 126

Tuesday 1^st Feb – Interval day! (1mile warmup, 3x 2km at 7m30 pace, 1 mile warmdown)

Show me the map!

So back we come to interval day.  Strangely, my previous disaffection for interval day has become lukewarm of late, since I can actually feel myself getting fitter.  (Actually, that’s not true.  I can’t feel myself getting fitter; no Popeye am I.  I can, however, notice over the weeks that I am finding the pain threshold appearing further (or at faster running pace) than it did before.  So maybe I can’t actually feel my muscles and stamina growing, but certainly I can see the benefits.  And I should have just said that to begin with, but what the hell, parentheses are the rambler’s best friend.)

At any rate, I went into this run having experienced a lot of pain in my left calf and Achilles after Sunday’s efforts.  This is an unusual position for me to be in, as I am usually pain-free.  I’ve not really suffered from injuries, recurring or otherwise, over the years, and felt a bit unfortunate to be feeling it now, since I’m training for what is (at least up to now) the race of my life.

Anyway, despite these misgivings, I went out with my standard positive attitude and got the run done.  I was under the times given by the schedule, again, which is all I ask, but it did come at a price.  At the point I stopped running, I was immediately in pain and unable to do much more than limp.

I crawled into bed that night thinking a good night’s sleep would put the world to rights.

Miles so far this week: 6.9
TOTAL MILES: 126.5

Wednesday 2^nd Feb – 9 miles in approx. 9m45 pace

Not much really to say about this one.  I was still experiencing pain, but decided to get out and see what it felt like anyway.  The answer, inevitably, was that it felt like someone repeatedly stabbing my leg with a knife whilst forcing me to run.  As a torture device, it works.  As a training device, it fails in its remit.

Half a mile after starting the run, I was back at the house.  The rest of the week was written off; the leg needed more time to heal and coming back early would have served no purpose other than delay the healing.

After the joy of last week, this was a bit of a comedown.  I’m keeping the spirits up, though.  No one goes through 3 months of training with no injury worries.  I’m keeping the fingers crossed that they are nothing more than strains.