Training Day – Page 8

On repeatedly running up hills at 6.30am

It’s insane, basically.

Several commuters travelling down Muswell Hill this morning may have reported a woman acting suspiciously between 6.45am and 7.03am on the pavement leading from the Victoria Stakes pub to the junction of Cascade Avenue.

The woman, who was wearing a white t-shirt and grey flappy shorts, appeared to be racing up the hill repeatedly, despite showing obvious and distressing signs of pain.

“I was worried for my kids”, Olivia Colney-Hatch (39) might have told police, “We were stuck at the lights for 10 minutes and they were forced to watch this crazy woman hurting herself for no reason. I locked the doors. It was frightening.” Mark Fortismere (23) was also concerned, “Ladies should look pretty, but she was all red-faced and sweaty. It was rank.”

Death by Intervals

I keep my promises.

I’ve signed up for another Regent’s Park 10k and yesterday I started a new training schedule.

It was hard to find a free 10k training plan on the web that wasn’t aimed at beginners. I know enough about running to know what works for me, but not enough to know how to combine sessions to make me faster. I want to run about 30 miles a week and include intervals, tempo, hills and long runs. After a dismissal-worthy amount of googling at work, I found a plan. It wasn’t in a good format so I made a spreadsheet:

10k training plan – 8 weeks

It looks hard, but not mountainously so. I have no idea whether it will work. My scientific conclusion is that it’s worth a try.

The first session, last night, was an interval session of 4×1600 at 10k pace. I measured out a loop of 2 x 2 miles with 1/2 mile recovery gaps in between and went round it twice. It was not fun. I re-discovered that the pace at which I think I could run 10k, is not actually the pace at which I can run 10k. I did the miles (or 1600 metres if we are being consistent) in 7minutes 15 seconds each, other than the final one which took some time longer*. I have run a half-marathon at that pace, but yesterday I could barely manage four individual miles. I have some way to go with this plan.

*I have no idea how much longer. How much longer do you have?

5k Challenge

I came out of the office to an Edward Hopper summer’s evening. Waiting for the bus, several runners passed, throwing sharp blue shadows onto the gold pavement. I snapped one’s departing calves, enviously, knowing I was headed underground to my gym.

It’s been a few weeks since I did any training other than running. From experience I know that’s the swift way to injury so I’m going to try to go twice a week from now on. I also want to test out my 5k theory – that running a hard 5k every week will speed up my 10k time.

I know it was only on the treadmill, but I ran the 5k in 20 minutes, 10 seconds. I don’t know if I could run that on the road, but that time must indicate I could break 43 minutes over 10k.

Weekly Rrrrrround-up

OOPS.

Last week marked the penultimate week of my half-marathon training, during which I managed to go running 5 times and write about it 0 times. In my defence, it was an odd week, bookended by two public holidays, with a royal wedding, a hen night, and a real wedding in the middle. I could and should have squeezed in writing about my running as well as running itself, and will promise to do better in future.

To summarise progress, one week from Race Day:

I ran 31 miles;
my pace is looking good, averaging 7-minute miles during Friday’s 6 mile tempo run ;
my health is looking bad, with a cold contracted mid-real wedding, which continues to gather its own pace;
the weather is still amazing; and
running just before a Royal Wedding begins is a lovely, though quite lonely, thing to do.

Here’s a photo from my 10.30am run on Friday, looking down towards the city from Ally Pally park. I saw one other person in the park, he had a thermos of coffee and a stack of newspapers and looked very pleased with himself. He was not wearing red, white or blue.

Summer is here: Happy Easter!

I’m sitting in my garden on an April evening, wearing shorts and still feeling too hot. Yesterday I actually had to go and buy an ice lolly to cool down. It’s lovely to be outside on this long weekend but it does feel wrong to be worried about your Easter eggs melting in the sun, in April, in England.

This morning, this weekend really, was all about the 12 mile “race-sim”: 6 miles easy, 6 miles fast. I took it seriously enough to forego the booze and eat a decent pasta meal last night. I even bought an energy gel last week to have on the way (I usually just stick to jelly babies). None of this helped. Or if it did, then I dread to think what the run would have been like without them. I felt exhausted from about 2 miles in, the energy gel was like sucking down half a tube of warm orange toothpaste and the last 2 miles were as tough as the end of any real race I’ve done. I guess that is the point of a “race-sim”, but compared to my lovely Dorset run two weeks ago it was grim.

Forcing myself to be positive, we managed the 6 fast miles at a pace of 7min 20 secs per mile, which was good given the temperature and fact that some of them were along the Seven Sisters Road. That road should not be part of any fast run- It was like Ski Sunday today: churchgoers with Easter baskets walking three abreast, bins, lampposts, winos and scampering pitbulls. I should be thankful we made it back in one piece.

Giving your all

So Ryan Hall, of training plan fame, came fourth in the Boston marathon on Saturday, with a time of just under 2 hours 5 minutes. Not bad I suppose, but was he running up Shepherd’s Hill at 5k pace this morning before 6.30am? No he was not.

Of all the hard sessions in his excellent plan, interval training is still the one I’m most comfortable with. The thought of a tempo run before breakfast turns my stomach, but I quite enjoyed the intervals this morning. I suspect I was running them (5 x 1k at 5k pace) more slowly than I would have at 6.30pm, but I was going as fast as I could and only cut one of them short (the last, and only by 30 seconds).

It was a warm morning and the sky glowed pink over blue Crouch End rooftops as the sun came up. When I got home I was too hot to face breakfast, but had to force down some toast just before leaving for work to avoid fainting on the tube. This is most unlike me, usually I am eating within 5 minutes of finishing a run.

I really felt for all the London marathoners on Sunday, running in unseasonable heat. It’s the one thing you can’t do anything about – I saw two elite runners vomit after they crossed the finish line, one of them pretty copiously. Good for her, I thought, there’s no doubt now in anyone’s mind that she gave it her all. The proof is in the puking…

Going the extra mile (or not)

So, it wasn’t a cold, but instead a weird fevery-virus type affair that lasted a couple of days and completely wiped me out . I went for three days without running, the most since my post- marathon recovery week in November. On Saturday morning I was still feeling shady, but decided to risk a short run in the spirit of ‘kill or cure’. As I’m not writing this from an afterlife where ghosts sit around drinking wine and blogging (imagine that), it was happily the latter.

I don’t think running is generally to be recommended as a cure for illness, but it definitely does wonders for my mental wellbeing. I am not good at being ill, by which I mean that a) I’m not ill very often, thankfully, and b) I struggle to embrace the advantages of illness. On normal days I fantasize about sitting at home or in the garden with my book, sipping cold beverages or painting my toenails while watching episodes of Monk. When I am ill I feel too guilty to switch on the TV and draw the curtains for fear that the view of the garden might prevent my headache from reaching its true potential. Illness destroys all my positivity; running restores it.

This morning no trace of illness remained and I thought, what better to aid full recovery than a 14 mile run? It’s the longest run in my training plan and I might feel like a fraud if I didn’t at least attempt it. As it was, we didn’t manage it. Mr Notajogger and I plodded around our old half-marathon route and, from about 6 miles in, the idea of tacking on the extra mile at the end began to feel more and more extravagant. I mean, what would it actually achieve? We will never know, as we stopped our watches outside Nando’s on Stroud Green Road (the traditional end of our 13 mile runs during marathon training) at 1 hour 46 minutes. I want to knock 12 minutes off that in three weeks’ time – maybe we should have done that extra mile…

Rewards

I got back from the gym an hour and a half ago, since when I have had a hot bath, watched a trashy TV programme (The Model Agency) and eaten a trashy meal (beans on toast). I then ate some cereal straight from the packet. There is a Cameron Diaz film on in the background as I write this. Despite the bath, I feel a bit dirty now.

At the gym I ran the same interval programme as two weeks ago, and the air conditioners weren’t working so I sweated a lot. It went well – I was able to run all the sections at the speeds I planned and I felt like I was pushing myself hard to do it. Sadly, however, I think the reason I felt so good after the run was that I found out that I hadn’t put on any weight this week, after mysteriously gaining 7 lbs since New Year.

It saddens me to spend any time thinking about weight, fatness and thinness. One of the things I love about running is that it frees me from worrying about what I eat. Food becomes fuel as well as something to be enjoyed. I love the protein cravings brought on by high mileage. I love the mid-morning snacks when I’m feeling a bit faint after a pre-breakfast run. I love the pre-run bananas and the post-run energy drinks and the mid-run flapjacks. I love food, and I resent any time spent worrying about whether I’m eating too much of it.

I’m not, I don’t think. Why just yesterday I turned down a second piece of carrot cake.

10k or 12 mile?

Ever since I realised that someone I had been calling Tim “Joss” with a hard “J”, actually pronounced his name Tim “Yoss”, I can’t think of my blog without muttering, “not a yogger”. I don’t think I’m a yogger. It does sound like fun though – perhaps involving a yomp through a Danone factory.

Yesterday I yogged a series of 6 km intervals at 10k pace, with recovery periods of half the time. For ease of adding up I went for 4min 20 secs at 10k pace, 2mins 10 secs recovery (6mins 30 secs per set). I ran around Regent’s Park so don’t really know whether I stuck to the pace, however I did note the start and finish locations of my third interval and using mapmyrun I can tell you that it was 1.06km, so that’s pretty damn close.

Having had a fairly hard week last week, including a hefty run on Sunday, my legs were seriously feeling the pain. In total contrast to Sunday, when I felt like my legs were writing cheques my lungs could happily cash, yesterday my whole system was overdrawn and bankruptcy felt imminent at the end of each fast km.

To spin out this spurious metaphor, I have a dilemma for this Sunday: do I keep withdrawing cash from the bank of the “Ryan Hall Training Plan“, and get both a 6 mile tempo run and a 12 mile run under my belt this week, or should I keep the money in the bank and save it up for a Regent’s Park 10k on Sunday morning?

I have free entry to the race, which is the only reason I’m feeling guilty for pulling out, if I’m honest. I’m really enjoying the training plan and don’t want to miss out on this week’s sessions, which I’d have to do if wanted to prepare properly for a race. Also, I don’t want to have to get up early on Sunday morning. I think the 12 miles is just edging ahead…

Whoop!

I am really happy to report that last week I ran a total of 32 miles, over 5 days, and that my final run of the week was the best of the lot.

We ran 10 miles as a ‘race-sim’, with 6 miles at an easy pace (for us, this was 8 minute miles), and 4 miles at race pace plus 20 seconds (which was supposed to be 7 and a half minute miles, but was actually 7m 15 secs). I am permitting myself an exclamation mark in the title in recognition of this pace. I am so impressed my legs managed to turn out that kind of speed without my heart feeling like it was going to burst. This is particularly notable as the 4 miles at the end of the run was mostly uphill.

Elevation

I’m not sure I even need to add the other good things about the run:

no hangover
sun was shining
saw a heron in Regent’s Park
blossom galore

It was such a good run, it’s made me want to ignore my day off today and go out again anyway. I won’t of course.