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.
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.
No, this isn’t the brand name for Stefaan Engels’ latest challenge, and with respect to the Belgian it would be a pretty low target to set oneself. Nor is it the anticipated duration of Katie Price’s latest marathon attempt, though I’ve sort of given the game away with that one. In 34 days’ time, the London Marathon takes place.
Now, 34 is not as arbitrary a number is it might seen at first. The reason I’m suddenly getting excited about the race is that my race pack arrived today and with it the magazine, mainly an advertiser for the sponsors but also packed full of information about the race. The headline act is Kebede vs Wanjiru in the Battle of East Africa, with support acts Mikitenko vs Shobukhova in the Battle of East Europe, Lemoncello vs everyone else in the Battle of Britain (rings a bell – is that one taken already?) and of course special guest Banks vs the 2:30 barrier.
Until recently the race had seemed a distant prospect, something to think about in detail at a later date, but the passing of my last big race effort yesterday and the arrival through my letterbox of the red envelope today has made it a very real prospect. I can’t even begin to describe what it feels like to run such a large and well supported event. You really have to try it for yourself.
But combined with this excitement are fear and anxiety. Ultimately, those 2 or 3 hours on 17th April will determine whether you’ve had a good winter or a bad winter. This is the driving test, the final 3 hour exam of your degree, the last question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. You’ve done the hard work, but is it going to pay off? I am going to do all I can these next few weeks to make sure the answer is yes. One more week of hard training will be followed by a long taper during which I will cut the volume first and then the intensity of my training, allow my muscles to heal and prepare myself mentally for the task ahead. This sounds dramatic of course, but I do believe that as long as you leave no stone unturned you are more likely than not to meet your goal.
I’ve worked hard for this one, much harder than any of my previous marathons. It’s getting close. I can hear the start gun sounding in my head already.
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 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!
