Two Weeks’ In

After five days’ straight running I am taking a day off today. Cue sunshine and blue skies. Despite being tired and struggling to run fast this week, I feel really positive about the training plan.

Two weeks’ in, I’m already seeing the logic in the sessions. An interval run with long intervals requires you to understand your limits, choose a sustainable pace and stick to it.  In an interval training session with short (2 minute) bursts I tend to run hell-for leather in an uncontrolled way, as fast as I can manage, with no clue whether each burst is faster or slower than the last. This method is helping me become faster over longer periods, which makes sense for the half-marathon distance.

The tempo runs are still a bit of a mystery to me. I wonder if that’s because, when I’m feeling good, I tend to up my tempo anyway? 

 The “Race-Sim”, an easy few miles followed by a faster few miles, gives me hope that I might be able to speed up over the course of the race, rather than starting out way too fast and then dying in the last 3 miles.

All in all it’s been an enlightening week – 28 miles in total and some serious hard work put in. I also learned a valuable lesson: don’t give blood in the week before a race.