Month: January 2012

Approaching 30…

No, not me, my mileage. I’m still 21*.

Marathon training starts on 16 January, one week away. My aim over Christmas was to get up to 30 miles a week by now. Or was it 35? Either way, I ran 30 miles last week. Actually I ran 29.7, but given the margin for error on the mapmyrun app, this was definitely over 30.

Probably. During Sunday’s run the disembodied Voice of the App announced that I had run “distance: 3.0 mile” twice, so I’m taking her pronoucements with a pinch of salt. Mysteriously, by mile 8 we were back on course.

I ran twice this weekend: a 5.5 mile trot on Saturday and a supposedly slower paced 9 miles on Sunday. In actual fact I ran them both at the same pace, though Sunday’s felt much easier. There was no logic to this, and certainly no plan behind it. I should have been more tired on Sunday and it felt like I was running much more slowly.

When the training starts I must be stricter with my pace. Faster sessions will have to get harder and easy runs will need to be just that. The long Sunday runs should be 1 minute per mile slower than my planned marathon pace so I will be spending a lot more time on my feet. I may need some new podcast recommendations.

*A lie.

Elevation Revelation

Yesterday morning I woke at 6am and staggered into the kitchen to get a glass of water before going for a run. ‘What is that sound?’, I wondered as I headed for the sink. An aeroplane seemed to be passing directly overhead. At the sink I looked up to see waves of water washing down our sloping skylight, spattered with falling gobs of hail.  

I went back to bed.

At 6pm I tried again. The wind had dropped to a non-terrifying level and the rain had dried up, leaving a clear and cold London skyline winking beyond the tops of Crouch End’s hills. Hills that, I now have a mapmyrun elevation to prove, are properly hills. Hills that I ran all the way up and down for the first time in a while.

The first 1.6 miles of my regular Muswell Hill route are uphill, and there are only 1.5 miles of flat running in the whole route. Experience had told me that this was the case, of course, but somehow seeing it in digital colour was a revelation.

Cold Runnings

Ugh. My cold is officially A Cold and I am officially a boring person who bores everyone as if she were the only person in the world ever to have A Cold. I can only apologise in advance, and promise to avoid the word ‘mucus’.

It was more of a struggle than usual to get up at 6am for this morning’s 5 miles. As well as coping with the Cold, I had our cat Bill to contend with overnight. He had been granted special permission to sleep on the bed due to having a(nother) torn up face from fighting, so the combination of trying to curl around him and continuing to breathe out of my blocked nose didn’t result in the best night’s sleep.

Once out of the house though, I was sure that five minutes’ running would be enough to clear the passages (sorry) and make me feel better. Alas, it was not to be. The constant feeling that I was about to sneeze stayed with me for the whole run. I used a whole packet of tissues and exhausted my total supply of motivation. By the final mile I was running as if pushed from behind by a broom handle in the lower back, arms and legs flailing pathetically.

It was not a vintage performance. I managed, just, to keep my pace below 8 minutes a mile which, under the circumstances, is nothing to be sniffed at.

(Sorry)

In with the New

The 2nd of January dawned bright and cold in London. By 7:30am there was a hint of blue in the sky and, could it be? Yes, the sun was making its first appearance of the year.

Outside my bedroom window the garden was slowly filling with colour. Inside my head was filling with cold. Mr N has had various forms of man-flu since Christmas Eve and they seem to have finally caught up with me.

However, it was the last day of the holidays, the sun was out and I need to run 30 miles this week. Of course I was going to run. To help, I tried a new trick to motivate me.

I’ve used MapMyRUN for ages to plan my runs but I didn’t realise that their free iPhone app could measure and time my runs. I take my phone with me anyway – why didn’t I know about this earlier? I downloaded it and set it to talk to me every mile, telling me my average pace.

It worked! I am always surprised when modern technology does what it says it will. The only downside is that it might make me go a bit too fast. The nice lady telling me my pace brings out my competitive side. “Only 8 minutes per mile”, she seems to be saying, “even though you were running 7 minutes 30″.

As a result, I ran faster than I have for a while. Probably not the wisest move with a cold. Here are the stats, which I will be quoting with irritating regularity from now on:

5.02 miles; 37:51 minutes; 7:35 pace.

Out with the Old

Happy New Year to all runners, ex-runners and would-be runners. I think that covers everyone.

It’s a miserable day in London so I’m glad I finished my 25 miles for the week yesterday. For the last run of 2011 I ran to Regent’s Park with Mr Notajogger and our friend Brian, aka the Rocket from Runcorn. As Mr N has been busting out super-fast 10k’s left right and centre, and Brian runs like a bullet from a gun, I had visions of them giving me the slip by Tufnell Park tube and running the next 8 miles by myself.

Thankfully they were kind; they kept to an ‘easy’ pace of just over 8 minute miles and took a trip to the gents’ half way round so I got a chance to get my breath back. I haven’t run in a group of more than two for years and it was surprisingly great. We (ok, I) talked the whole way round, I never once thought about stopping and I didn’t have to motivate myself to keep going, I just did it.

I wonder if this is something I should do more of in 2012? It’s more manageable than my other resolution – to run a marathon in 3:30. My last and only other marathon was a 3:55 but it was hilly and I took it relatively easy. If I can run a half-marathon in 7 minutes 10 a mile then I can run a full marathon in 8 minutes a mile, right?

2011 wasn’t a vintage running year for me. Other than starting this blog, I haven’t broken any new ground. Every race has been slower than my best, every training programme thwarted by illness. 2012 will be better.