Sick 6

As I write this, on Friday morning, the world is a beautiful place. The view from my office window may be a symphony in grey and beige, but there is a technicolour wonderland inside my head. I can breathe, I can taste, I can even smell (a bit). My cold has gone!

At least, I think it has.

Last night, however, it had not. I brought my kit to work in order to force myself to run home, knowing in advance that this was the only way I would do it. It is a good trick, particularly if you place said kit by your desk where people will trip over it, then tell all of them that you are running home tonight (for peer pressure). Then eat a large lunch and several biscuits (for guilt pressure).

At 6pm I headed home on foot with just a packet of tissues and a grimace. I had mapped out a 6 mile route winding through the depths of Clerkenwell and Old Street. After a day’s rain, night had descended cold and clear, clamping down on puddles with a black hand.

Grim faces hid behind collars and brims. Crouching lanes of traffic crept up behind me, bicycle brakes screeched and bus queue backs blocked my way. Every step seemed to be uphill, my neck craning to stay upright. At Sainsbury’s on Stroud Green Road, I finally stopped and stepped out of the dark into six feet walls of shiny packaged propaganda. I was trapped in a video game, a virtual world of consumerism, collecting points and scanning items. When I had inserted my card into the chip and pin device, I was deposited, shivering, back on the stiff concrete to walk home with the spoils.

Into Intervals

I can’t bear to talk again about my C word, so I won’t. Please bear in mind that it is still in progress and judge my performance/mood  today in its light.

Day two of the training programme called for 7 miles containing 10 x 1 minute fast, 2 minutes slow. That’s half an hour of intervals but, more importantly, nearly a whole hour’s running before work on a Wednesday. In the rain.

Thankfully the arctic temperatures of yesterday had receded and I was able to run my warm up without resembling the Hunchback of Tufnell Park. I could also wear my regular running gloves rather than the enormous ski-mittens I’m now sporting on extra-cold days. They may be warm, but they look ludicrous.

I can’t say it was good to be running intervals again, but it did make me feel like a ‘proper runner’. You’re no-one until you’ve pelted past a pedestrian at breakneck speed only to have them wander by you moments later, laughing.

So It Begins

Let the marathon training commence! The North Dorset Village Marathon is now 16 weeks away and my training for it officially started this morning at 6.15am with a 6 mile run – starting slowly, finishing faster. I completed it, despite my and the cold, and it felt ok. Not spectacular but passable. Solid. Fine.

I’m using the same training plan I used for my last (and only) marathon. It’s aimed at 3:30- 4:30 finishers, over 5 runs a week with no mid-week run longer than 8 miles. Perhaps my memory is playing tricks on me, but I think I enjoyed the training in 2010 so I’m looking forward to tackling it again.

 Marathon Schedule_May2012

There are three key challenges I have to face this time however:

  1. In 2010 I ran 3:55, this time I want 3:30.
  2. I trained with Mr Notajogger last time, in 2012 I’m on my own.
  3. Last time I trained in the sunlit summer and autumn, now it’s dark and cold.

I’m not so worried about 2 and 3, but 1 is going to be tough. Probably too tough. I would be happy to finish under 3:45, a ten minute PB. I do want to run 3:30 this year though, and I think I can do it this time. I don’t want to set my sights too low and regret not pushing hard enough.

3:30 marathon, you are my goal and I will have you.

Things I have learned in the last week:

  1. Tiredness may not be due to running, it might be the start of a horrid virus;
  2. Chocolate oranges do not offer the same immunity benefits as actual oranges;
  3. Films featuring small dogs in a central role should win Oscars;
  4. Skipping two days’ running in favour of lying in bed is good for the body but not the spirit;
  5. Running with a mild fever helps counteract the effects of icy weather;
  6. Though really isn’t to be encouraged;
  7. I mean that, stay in bed folks;
  8. Kendal mint cake is the new running gel;
  9. Just because you can run 10 miles doesn’t mean you’re cured;
  10. A hot toddy is the answer, no matter what the question.

Burning the Candle

I’ve only just started increasing my mileage for this year’s marathon effort, but yesterday I was starving all day. This morning I felt so exhausted I had to force myself out for a run. Suddenly it all came flooding back – how I felt all the way through the 16 weeks of marathon training in 2010. Isn’t it funny how one forgets the general life that goes around the training, and only remembers the runs or injuries?

I am enjoying the hunger, though I need to be wary of it. I suspect that my body is is really craving protein, not KitKats. The tiredness I am not enjoying. Last night I stayed up to watch a terrible film (He’s Just Not That Into You) and hated myself for it. Why was I propping my eyelids open with Jennifer Aniston, Ben Affleck and the weedy guy from Entourage (not even the good-looking one!) when I had to get up again at 6am to run? To make myself feel marginally better, I did my ironing while watching it. It didn’t help. Nor did it help me understand why Bradley Cooper is considered to be attractive.

There’s not much to say about the run. I stuck to the flat 5 mile route and 8 minutes a mile pace. It was tedious but it’s another 5 in the bank. I will try to get an early night tonight but I’m seeing another film (The Artist) so hopefully I will be able to wait until afterwards.

I’m Running up that Hill

Last week I ran four 5 mile runs, using two different routes: one flat, one hilly. I didn’t fancy either route this morning, so I left the house without a plan. I ended up zig-zagging around Crouch End for 6 miles over a mixture of hills and flat bits.

Over Christmas a friend expressed surprise that I, Not A Jogger, would ever give in and Walk during a Run. He was right, I’m always advising people to “run really really slowly but never walk”. In my defence, I’ve lost fitness and it’s really hilly, but that’s no excuse. As I was struggling up the first hill this morning I remembered something I had heard in a marathon talk podcast over the weekend. On the show, Tom and Martin had a ‘training talk’ segment about hills and how to tackle them in races. Tom discussed how, during his best ever race, he decided to run hills with an even heart-rate – not going above 162 on the way up, and not below 158 on the way down. To do this, he had to run very slowly on the way up, and really fast on the way down.

I don’t have a heart-rate monitor, but I decided to give this a go based on how out-of-breath I felt.

It worked!

I ran solidly for the whole 6 miles and managed to feel good at the brow of each hill instead of struggling to get my breath back all the way to the bottom. I also loved pelting it as fast as possible on the way down.

Highly recommended.

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.