Well with the disastrous Sunday run last week this was always going to be a bad weeks running. The aim for me this week was just to "maintain" my endurance hopefully with around a 30 mile week and hopefully add some faster stuff in towards the end of the week. Also I was reading some interesting material on Kenyans and their steady runs (I'll do a longer article on this shortly) and wanted to try running a faster "steady" for once as I currently feel I get bogged down too much in the middle steady/easy pace which isn't really recovery or a good aerobic effort. For me this is about 7-8mm.
Monday: Rest day (was still clearly not well)
Tuesday: Rest day (and again)
Wednesday: 51:54 club run around Oxrad with a slightly faster finish with Alex and Martin. Legs were turning over well but still struggling with the chest.
Thursday: 16 wund Club Track Sess of 4 x 4 x 400 @ 10k/5k/3k/5k [45/lap jog] this session can I think be done all at 3k pace or faster but I tried to stick roughly to the paces. First 3 sets were all roughly 77/74/71/74 with the final set me working a little bit harder and doing 74/69/69/71 (added a sprint 100m finish afterwards). Relaxed session to get me back into it.
Friday: 32 steady. Faster run with the first 5 and last 7 minutes easy but the middle 20 at around or just below 6mm. (see above)
Saturday: 60. Probably around 20 minutes of this run was at 6mm but was much more broken up with slower patches of running as didn't want to tire myself with the race coming up.
Sunday: 20 warm-up, 1500m Indoors at Birmingham 4th 4:22. 47 warm-down/steady. Also managed to get a 15 minute massage for £4 subsidised by midland athletics.
Totals: 270 minutes / 36 miles (ish)
Considering that I entered this week fairly ill and with an annoying hip and quad niggle and am leaving it on the road to recovery (though I think body is still weak from illness) and niggle-free (as much as any runner can be) I'm generally quite pleased. Also the mileage is perhaps slightly deceptive as normally I divide by 7.5 to get a mileage estimate as despite sessions being fast I do a lot of "recovery" and "easy" running at about 8-9mm and the slowest I ran this week was about 7:30 so probably more like 40 miles.
Race report: 1500m was always going to be a stretch having not run anything faster than 68 for 400m and nothing faster than 70/lap for anything longer than 400m. I set of with a target pace of 68/lap or 4:15. I was running reasonably well but unfortunately most people started off too fast and were just dying so no sooner did I catch someone then I had to go round them with no chance for me to draft at all (in retrospect I might have been better going with the lead group and trying to hang on). I wasn't far off at 800m but struggled over the final 700. No problem with breathing, lactic acid build up (surprisingly little in fact!) or tiredness I just couldn't get my legs to move fast enough. Whilst a bit dissappointed this is a second faster than I opened outdoors last year about 2 months down the line and I can tell there is an awful lot more in the tank. I'm hoping the illness is a factor as well.
If I want to run a faster 1500m I need to:-
A) improve my base speed [strides and 150s],
B) Improve my just general work at paces below 70 seconds as right now 68 is about as fast as my body knows how to run [200-800s @ 66-70]
C) Learn to generate some lactate and run hard with it in the system [400-600 HARD]
Will post a longer bit on thgouhts about steadies, easy running and recovery running tomorrow hopefully...
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