Building up the mileage. Two runs home from work. Ran a half marathon with friends as part of my long run.
Monday: 12 easy (12)
Tuesday: Ran home (9)
Wednesday: 12 steady 75-80 mins approx (12)
Thursday: Ran home (9)
Friday: 11 easy/steady (11)
Saturday: 9 easy (9)
Sunday: 21 miles including Birmingham HM , 23rd in 73:20 (21)
Week total: 83 miles
2012 total: 2771 miles
Taken from my training log.
One day off. A good track session. Slightly heavy legs for the race on Thursday. I reckon I can go 15 seconds quicker on that course with better conditions and preparation.
Monday: Rest (0)
Tuesday: 1600,1200,800,400. Recovery equal to next rep distance. 4:45,3:31,2:14,62. Hard. (11)
Wednesday: Long bike ride, 6 easy (6)
Thursday: Rowheath 5k, 4th in 15:56. Rainy and cold. (12)
Friday: 12 easy (12)
Saturday: 6 mile tempo in 32:59, 3 miles of sprint straight/jog bend (14)
Sunday: 16 easy, 2 hours. Sore. (16)
Week total: 71 miles
2012 total: 1690 miles
Taken from my training log.
Last night’s hill session was great. I managed to get 5 guys to come down for a few reps of our usual hill, more people than I would normally train with on a Tuesday evening. The hill efforts we do are 400m long, starting on the flat and getting steeper as you climb. I had done the same session on my own the previous Tuesday and it had been a struggle right from the first effort. Training in a group is much easier. So to celebrate that fact I won’t talk about the session, I’ll tell you about the guys who did it.
Chris has been a member of the club for a while but has only just started training with us. He’s a sub-34 10k runner and a triathlete who looks likely to take a big chunk off his marathon PB in April. He started the session tentatively but absolutely blasted rep number 8, acting as rabbit for the whole group. Starting too fast can be a good thing though; it trains the body to deal with pain. And I could certainly feel he was in pain as I passed him half way up the hill.
Tim, star of last week’s blog, was also in attendance and became the first person to actually manage ten reps of the hill after having set out to do so. He has been putting the miles in recently and is very strong. I had to make do with pacing him half way on rep 9 as I was spent after 8.
Ben is a mountain goat. He ran every club race at cross country this winter and just seems to do better on an incline than on the flat. His powerful sprint also suggests that he could be a rather useful 400 meter runner, should distance running not prove to be his thing. We had a nice little battle on the 8th rep.
Last, but not least, Rob joined us after the first rep. He gradually worked his way into the session showing far greater patience than the rest of us. I didn’t see the end of his last rep, but reports (Tim) suggest that he adopted a sit and kick approach, something that clearly dates back to his days as a middle distance man. You see, Rob is a dormant volcano when it comes to running, but when he erupts he does it with style and devastating speed. The speed needed to run 1:59 and 4:04 doesn’t just go like that. Now it’s time to get this man in a race before they delete his power of 10 page.
One notable absentee was my usual training partner Mark, missing due to illness. He missed a good one.
Full splits on my training log.
It was recently brought to my attention that I haven’t written much recently. In fact, looking back through the pages of this blog, I note that that last thing I wrote that wasn’t just a summary of my week’s training was posted on December 22nd. Six weeks and nothing original. But on the plus side, I have been running plenty.
The man who brought this alarming fact to my attention is a friend, training partner and club-mate who goes by the name of Tim. Tim also writes about running. He’s good at it.
Tim is a distance runner who dabbles in the odd bit of architecture (or was it the other way round?) and it seems that his fondness for design has also led him to a very meticulous approach to designing his training. Last October I sat down with another runner-buddy and composed what I thought at the time was a detailed outline of the training we would do for the next six months. I emailed it to Tim who then sent me his. Whilst I had used the ‘that-looks-pretty-impressive’ approach to planning my training, Tim had created a plan using the ‘grounded-in-rigourous-sports-science’ approach, one not previously known to me. This is also a man who rarely deviates from the schedule and sets himself tough but attainable goals; in this case 15:50 for 5000m at the university champs in May.
Beyond the vocabulary I have learned from Tim (still not sure about the difference between a macrocycle and a mesocycle though) I have learned the importance of setting yourself goals and being meticulous in the way you plan your path to those goals.
So here’s my goal and plan. The goal is to break 15:15 for 5k by this time next year. The plan is to train harder and smarter.
Only one session this week. Long tempo on Sunday didn’t happen because of the snow.
Monday: 10 easy (10)
Tuesday: 12 easy (12)
Wednesday: AM 5 easy PM 10 easy (15)
Thursday: 6x(700/300) off 100 jog – 2:10/51/2:10/53/2:08/54/2:08/53/2:05/54/2:04/49 (11)
Friday: AM 5 easy PM 10 easy (15)
Saturday: 13 easy (13)
Sunday: 14 easy. All on snow. (14)
Week total: 90 miles
2012 total 407 miles
Taken from my training log.