Month: March 2011

Friday Fail

A confession: this morning I spent 45 minutes reading my book club book in bed this morning instead of running 6 miles. I am currently feeling pretty guilty, though I will run it tomorrow instead.

As if a Friday morning spent eating toast and drinking tea  in bed, when I could have been running in the cold, wasn’t already enough of a guilty pleasure, the book I’m reading made it even more so. Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls is more Irish than a pint of Guinness eating a potato in a peat bog. I’m only 50 pages in but I’m already feeling nauseous from the steaming mounds of hokey oirish charm seved with a side order of paedophilia and domestic violence. I feel like a teenager reading a Maeve Binchy hidden under a geography text book.

Back to the running guilt. My knees are feeling a little strained after the exertions of the last 3 days so I think a rest was necessary rather than simply fancied. They have to make it through 14 miles this weekend, so I feel it only fair to let them de-creak for a day.

Double-decker

When I’m running to a training schedule, I try to fit the running in to my life, rather than the other way around. This sounds very sensible and non-Madonna-ish, but in reality it means I run at crazy times, carrying bags of stuff, with a hangover or, in today’s case, twice in 12 hours.

Yesterday’s commandment was “OFF, cross-train, or easy run of 30-45 minutes”. Today’s was “Easy run: 30-45 minutes”. I’m going out for drinks tonight so knew I would have to run this morning but, rather than take a fully legal day OFF, I hopped aboard the cross-train and went to the gym last night at 7pm like a loser.

Getting changed afterwards, I heard a woman say to her friend, “I couldn’t come more than twice a week, exercising more than twice a week is too much, it’s not healthy”. At 6.55am this morning, running up Crouch End Hill for the second time with my husband in the biting wind, I thought she might be onto something.

I’m a bit nervous about tomorrow’s run. It’s a “tempo run”, and I still don’t fully understand what they are… I think it’s when you run almost as fast as you can over that time/distance, but not quite. Which, over 4 miles with 1 mile warm up and cool down, at 6.30am with a hangover, is not going to be pretty. Eek!

New Leaves

Today I have turned over not one, but two new leaves. I have started a proper training programme and begun blogging every day. If I say it here, then I have to stick to it. Both leaves are now firmly turned over and stuck to the internet.

The first run in the programme was the snappily titled “5 x 800m at 10k pace; recover after each repeat for half the interval time”. In reality this translated as “leg it past frightened pedestrians at an uncertain pace for just over three minutes, panicking alternately that you are going too slow/fast, then wheeze along for two minutes hoping time has mysteriously stood still and you have a bit longer before the next sprinty bit”.

I was really surprised it was so hard, given that I’ve been running pretty regularly since a marathon in November. I think it’s because I struggle with the concept of 10k pace when not either a) running a 10k race, or b) on a treadmill. It’s difficult to judge how fast I am going when I have to dodge past dogs, stop for traffic lights and run up hills. I suppose I could use technology to solve this problem, but I have a feeling that it’s important to be able to judge how fast I’m running.

Apart from the uncertainty about pace, it was a fair start to my training, a 35 minute run home down some of Islington and Holloway’s less salubrious roads, listening to the new Radiohead album. I have a theory about that album which I’m hoping that future listens will bear out: I think it’s like the ‘lotus flower’ in the middle track – it slowly unfurls, starting out harsh and impenetrable, but opening out into something beautiful by the end.