Thursday, January 24, 2013

Training Week Commencing 21st January 2013

After last weeks solid effort this week was a real chance to consolidate. Unfortunately the snow wanted to make things difficult!

Training

Monday: 10 miles easy/steady (first 3 v. slow then 7:30s on fairly fresh snow for the rest of it) followed by core session (squats w. bar + 15kg) (10)

Tuesday: 6 miles v. easy (8:30mm) - legs feeling the effect of the core session. (6)

Wednesday: Rest

Thursday: wu, 6 lap MP tempo (10:34, 08, 17, 14, 35, 45 - AVG 10:26 / 5:58mm) , wd (16)

Friday: 4 steady at lunch (~7:30mm); 10.5 easy home (~8mm) (14.5)

Saturday: 90 minutes easy at 8mm (11)

Sunday: wu +17 miles steady at 7:12mm (18.5)

Total: 76 miles

Tired Legs

My strength/core session on Monday is really good but I think I pushed things a little too hard with the deadlift or the squat weight. Either that or running on the snow on Sunday and Monday had shattered my legs as I was really struggling on Tuesday with pretty dead legs. The rest day on Wednesday helped per them up again and they felt positively bouncy running to the Thursday session which unfortunately killed them off again.

I've generally been trying to do my runs a little faster since just before Christmas. This week reminded me of why I often end up running at 8mm - mileage slows you down! I was working relatively hard on Saturdays run but was still struggling to take the pace under 8mm. Similarly on Sunday the average pace of 7:12mm is reasonable but I think the whole group was feeling the effect of the hard run on Thursday.

Having done two decent mileage weeks from past experience this is about as bad as it gets in the "rebuilding" from jogger to runner but it lasts for a while. The first two weeks you're  just accumulating the fatigue in your legs with none of the improvement. The next two weeks I'll be running on tired legs but should start to see some improvement. After that it'll be a fairly constant level and once I take a rest period I'll start improving rapidly.

Sessions

Thursday was a really good session around a still slightly slushy Battersea Park. I quickly found myself in a group with Nathan and Matt and after a fast second lap I was running slightly off the back at my own pace, dropping when they surged and then reeling them in. At the end of the 4th lap they kicked on and I kept a nice steady aerobic pace going with a bit of a slowdown over the last lap as I stopped and fiddled around with my sock as I was picking up blisters. I've still got 15 seconds per mile to take off before London but I'm starting to feel I'm making a bit of progressing having averaged sub 6 for over an hour feeling "aerobic".

Sunday was interesting - at one point I had a blister forming and stopped to reverse my socks and had to work hard to catch the group up and discovered I could actually run a bit faster if I had to but it was definitely hard work on shattered legs. 

Hopefully next week will be a better one to really press on.

Right. That's it for this week. Keep on running folks.

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Bryn Running

Training diary and musings on running in general.