Archives // training

Running up that Hill

Saturday 28th May 2011

No, this is not a music blog. I’m not referring to the Kate Bush song, excellent though it is, nor am I referring to Placebo’s equally brilliant cover. This is about some of the training I’ve been doing recently.

Having fallen on a run a few weeks ago, I have been suffering from some muscle tissue damage in my right knee and have gradually been trying to regain strength in it and not lose too much fitness. Two weeks of almost no running were followed by two more of some jogging combined with massage and icing on my knee. I have not been able to train on track but have realised that running hard up hills has a similar training effect but is much less punishing on my knee.

Hill sessions were an element of my training that I had neglected in the past, prefering to do either speed or endurance sessions on the track, but as I stood breathlessly slumped against a wall after my 8th and fastest hill rep on Thursday evening, I realised that hill sessions are the real deal. You get the same anaerobic workout as you do on the track and a nice long recovery as you jog down the hill.

My particular favourite is shown below, a hill that starts flat and gets steeper and steeper as your legs fill with lactic acid. It is also exactly 400m, so although you can’t compare your times to one lap of the track, you’re doing well if you can get close.

Even once my knee heals, I’ll still be running up that hill.

DNF

Tuesday 19th April 2011

So here’s what happened at the London Marathon…

The aim was to have a go at 2:30, or at least try and get as close as possible. I felt I had earned the right to at least try after all the training I’ve been doing. This meant averaging 5:40 per mile so that was the pace I set off at. I was clicking off the miles nicely for 17 miles, only straying from my target pace by a few seconds at every mile marker. I ran about 14 miles with a guy from Coventry Godiva, another Midlands club, whom I recognised and realised was trying to hit the same splits as me.

At every drink station I sipped water or lucozade depending on what was being offered. Usually I cope just fine with this but today all the fluid just sat in my stomach and from about 8 miles I had a pretty uncomfortable stitch. This also meant that breathing became quite difficult, and that I didn’t take on any more as I knew this would make me feel sick. I kept the pace going but after about 17 miles the effect of not absorbing any liquids really caught up with me. I slowed down dramatically and started getting passed by some other runners. It wasn’t a huge number, but that is mainly due to the fact that the field is so thin around the 2:30 mark. The people who passed me were moving a lot quicker than I was. Just after 19 miles, I put in a surge to try and stick with a group who were coming past, but it felt as though I was sprinting just to stay with what was quite a modest pace. Shortly after passing the 20 mile marker in around 1:55 or 1:56 (it’s hard to recall this part of the race) I started wobbling and collapsed. Race over. I briefly considered getting up again and carrying on but I could barely speak, let alone run. It took the best part of a minute just to give the police officer my wife’s phone number. The St John’s Ambulance team took me to their tent and lay me down. After some time there, my stomach settled and the fluids started to get absorbed. I started feeling much better and headed to the finish to meet my family.

Some lessons learned:

1. Practise with drinks.

Sometimes I do drink on the run, but never at the same kind of pace I try to run a marathon at. Part of the problem may have been that my body is not used to taking on liquids whilst running at that intensity. Practising drinking on the run should help me work out exactly how much my stomach can handle at once and I won’t take on too much liquid.

2. Train harder and smarter.

I know I’ve increased both the volume and intensity of my training in the last 6 months, but there are definite areas I need to work on. For a start, I haven’t been running my long runs hard enough. In order to run a good marathon, you need to run a significant chunk of your long runs at target pace. The cost of this may be my long rep session on a Tuesday, but with the other speedwork I do, this shouldn’t be a problem.

Long rep/short recovery sessions will remain a fixture of my training schedule, as it is crucial to practise running when tired and with lactic accumulation in the legs. Mixing up the distances is also beneficial. I’ve found that alternating fast short efforts with long sustained efforts can really help train the body for the fatigue that comes from running 42k. Running doubles has also helped with my strength, as has the increase in the number of miles I’ve been running. This will continue.

3. Don’t trash talk

…about running times you’re not sure you’re capable of. When someone asks what time you’re going to run, be conservative in your claims.

I put a lot of pressure on myself, and perhaps I don’t need to put any more on my telling people I’m going to run a certain time.

4. Sometimes you just have a bad race

I’ve had some good races recently as a result of all the training I’ve been putting in. I’ve recorded PBs for 5k, half marathon and 20 miles, and even beat my 10k time in a solo effort on the track. Maybe I was just due a bad race. Sometimes you prepare well and just have a bad day.

5. Spend more time running and less time writ

Room (for) 101

Sunday 27th March 2011

This week I ran more miles than I have ever run in a week. From Monday to Sunday, 101 miles of track, road and trails passed beneath my weary and battered feet. Coupled with the fact that there were only 167 hours this week due to the clocks going forward (no more running in the dark – great news!), this total gives me my best mile per hour average of any week; about one for every hour I’ve been awake during these 7 days.

Now, the reason I felt the need to write about this is that the recording of my weekly mileage has never required a third digit before, and I have wondered for a while now what a hundred mile week would feel like. I know it isn’t a huge achievement; the proof of the pudding is always in the eating and mileage is meaningless if it doesn’t help you go faster on race day. There are people I know who regularly hit this kind of number so it isn’t a particularly impressive feat. Any man who is anti-social enough and has a forgiving enough wife (mine is wonderful) can run high mileage if he builds up to it. However, I still feel quite pleased to have pushed myself through it.

This wasn’t really a week of junk miles either. All my ‘in between’ runs – Monday, Wednesday and Friday were run at a decent pace and I hit some good sessions too. Tuesday was a 10k time trial, run solo on the track. The most boring session in our programme, it is never easy and always requires a sizeable dip into the reserves of mental strength. I ran it in 33:06, which is a personal best. I know that you should never race in training but my ‘proper’ personal best, by which I mean run in a race, is one of my weakest and doesn’t really reflect the shape I’m in now. Wednesday was a double with a tiring day at work sandwiched between the bread of a 4 mile easy and a half marathon. I had nothing in my legs for Thursday’s 300 and 600 session with the club, but put in a decent set of reps.

I tried something new on Saturday – my South African training partner’s ‘Elana Meyer’ session, a workout used by the Olympic medallist in her marathon days. It involves doing 1200m, 5000m, 1200m, 5000m and 1200m on the track with 45 second recoveries. The idea of the session is to run the 1200s hard to build up lactic acid in the muscles and try and hit the 5ks at marathon pace or quicker. The tiredness this causes in the legs is a fairly good simulation of the last few miles of a marathon when you really do need to concentrate on keeping the pace up. I managed to hit my target splits, with the exception of the last 1200. I felt like I was wading through treacle on this one and was much slower but it didn’t matter as much, as it is really only there to stop you running the second 5k too fast.

Today’s long run was a drag. I had heavy legs and didn’t really want to push the pace and fortunately my group were more than willing to go slowly too. I normally finish a week on 80 miles, not start my long run having done that many already. It was the last one before London.

The next three weeks are taper weeks, so I’ll be having some rest days and cutting a few miles off each run. It will be a strange feeling – my body has got used to running a lot – but it should mean I am fairly fresh on the 17th April.

Training’s banked. Now I’ve just got to do the business on the day. Easier said than done.

Training

Tuesday 22nd February 2011

I’ve been training hard. I’ve run two 90 mile weeks back to back and yesterday was my first rest day in 19 days. It is tiring but the experiment with higher volume seems to be working for me. The main benefit I am starting to feel is that I recover from runs so much more quickly. Often in the past it was difficult to get any quality in until late in the week because of the lingering effects of the Sunday long run. Now I feel I am running my Tuesday and Thursday track sessions at a higher intensity than I was before.

Mentally, everything seems to be falling into place for London, which is now only 54 days away. I ran a hilly 21 mile loop with my club mate Martin on Sunday and we covered the distance in 2:06, faster than my previous marathon pace and only slightly slower than my target pace. What pleased me more than my capacity to run at that pace, which I didn’t doubt given the right conditions, was my ability to push myself and stay focused for longer. Last month I blogged about the merits of doing long runs in groups compared to solo efforts, and the group long run every Sunday is really starting to pay dividends. The first of these was Sunday’s 2:06, a time that led Martin, as well as some of my American fellow runners on the Letsrun Marathon training forum, to revise his prediction downwards from 2:35 to 2:30. This does seem like a big step, given that I only broke 1:15 for the half recently. I am racing in a half marathon next weekend and then testing out my pace in a 20 mile race the following weekend. These should be good indicators of the shape I’m in.

If I can run 1:12 I will know I need to be targeting about 2:32 and will set my pace (5:48 per mile) accordingly, but if the time is closer to 1:15 then I will stick with my 2:35 pace of 5:55 per mile.

Of course everything depends on how I run on the day. I could set off too fast, I could be tripped, I could get ill or injured the week before. You can do all the training in the world and still have a bad day. I just like to think of hard training as something that reduces the probability of that happening. As the famous golfing expression goes: ‘The more I practise, the luckier I get.’

Mile Reps

Thursday 17th February 2011

Mile reps are one of my least favourite sessions and this week’s session was no exception.

My training partners and I are roughly following a cycle for our Tuesday sessions that goes: k reps, mile reps, 2k reps, 3k reps, time trial, which means that it’s about a month between similar sessions. The beauty of doing sessions on a 4- or 5 week cycle is is gives you a monthly update on the progress you are making. When I’ve got time I’ll also trawl through the 2010 sessions to see how my times compare to a year ago.

The update this week was a promising one, which I see as an indication that the high mileage experiment is starting to pay off. I feel stronger and more able to run on tired legs. No surprise really, given that that my legs are rarely anything but tired these days. I managed 5 reps, compared to 4 last time, and this time off the back of a heavier preceding week. The splits were also better, with an average of 5:12 compared to an average of 5:15 in January. This was mainly to do with the presence of a clubmate running them at a similar pace to me. We shared the work out. Well sort of. We ran at a comfortable pace for 3, I did one on my own and then tried in vain to chase him down on the fifth.

This session was probably the toughest I’ve done for a while. I probably haven’t trained this hard since the Autumn when I did 10x1k on my own. Heavy wind and rain added an extra challenge that was probably more mental than physical.

I can’t say I enjoyed it but certainly got a lot out of it. 8 weeks until London!