This week has been a week of decisions.
There's a fine line between running to your best ability without a) causing yourself an injury and b) running becoming a chore rather than something enjoyable. This week I felt my training schedule was coming close to ticking both boxes.
On Tuesday I was due to run some intervals but didn't feel right as I left the house at 6am. My hip was still hurting from the long run on Sunday and I didn't feel right in the head. It had all the hallmarks of over training. I ran about half a mile down the road and stopped. I sat on a wall and thought about what I was trying to do. My plan has been to run a marathon in under 3 hours 30 minutes. I wondered if this was a step too far considering that my previous best was 3 hours 44 minutes and that I had been injured only a couple of months ago. So, I cancelled my session for the day and decided to re-think my goal.
I decided that I would reset my objective for the marathon and would aim for sub 3 hour 45 minutes with the intention of beating my previous personal best. So I uploaded a new training schedule into my Garmin watch. This schedule was still based on pace rather than heart rate and the biggest difference I noticed was that although the training schedule required the same distances to be run the pace that they were to be run at was significantly slower.
New schedule in hand I started the training on Wednesday morning. This was a 9 mile run at a slow pace. I was much happier with the new schedule as it took some pressure off me. That was until I finished the run and realised that I had paced it at exactly the same pace as before I had changed schedules. Basically I could have run the same run using the old schedule and probably would have thought that it was tough but just because I had changed to an "easier" training schedule I enjoyed the run even though both would have been run at the same pace. This made me think that it was all psychological and hatched another plan.
This time I decided to revert to the 3 hour 30 minute schedule but instead of training by pace I am going to train by heart rate. This means that no matter how I feel my pace will be limited by how well my heart is pumping. As I improve then my pace will improve although my heart rate will stay the same. That is this week's plan anyway! With only six weeks to go until the marathon I haven't got time to be messing about with the schedule.
Staying over at friends for a barbecue on Saturday evening meant that I had to run my long run on the Saturday morning rather than the Sunday. It was meant to be a half marathon race but I couldn't find one locally being run on the Saturday morning so I had to go out on my own and just knock out a fast half marathon time. I managed to go sub 1 hour 40 minutes which I am pleased with and I think that under race conditions I could have gone up to 5 minutes quicker. That's what I like to think, the truth may be somewhat less. Here's the Garmin link to the half marathon.
This week I have to run another 20 mile long run. I will be running this on a Friday because I am away for a friend's 40th birthday weekend. I am hoping it doesn't go as badly as the last 20 miler that I did!
Sunday 28 August 2011
Sunday 21 August 2011
Marathon Training - Week 9
An enforced break from blogging whilst I have been away on holiday.
Managed to miss only three training sessions whilst on holiday. Due to being on a fly-drive of the western parts of the US I had to move a lot of the sessions around to match up with locations and temperatures. This meant that I had to do an 18 mile run on the Friday morning that we were due to fly out to LA. I followed this up with 5 miles near the LA airport hotel, another 4 miles in Lake Havasu City (amazingly hot, even at 6am), 10 miles in Williams near the Grand Canyon, 7 miles in Las Vegas (up and down the Strip), 5 miles in Sequoia and another 5 miles in Yosemite. I then did a 20 mile long run on the Tuesday in San Francisco where it was much, much cooler. Considering that in the afternoon we went sightseeing (on segways no less) and went out drinking in the evening I felt fine. My last run was a 5 mile run, in Oxnard, near LA. It was meant to be an 11 mile run but I had stomach problems and had to cut the run short!
Running abroad was both a challenge and exciting. The challenge was trying to fit all the training into the schedule. This involved getting up early (around 6am) so I could get back to the hotel in time to check out and drive to the next location. It also meant that I had to be aware of what I was drinking the night before and couldn't exactly hit the town, but since I was doing pretty much all of the driving I didn't want to be driving in a foreign country on the "wrong" side of the road with a hangover! The exciting aspect was in the variety of the running. In one holiday I have run in the Yosemite and Sequoia national forests, up and down the Las Vegas Strip and across the Golden Gate Bridge. I got to see things that I didn't have a chance to when sightseeing.
Since landing back in the UK I have been following my running schedule closely. The difficulty has been trying to adjust to jet lag. On Tuesday I did not sleep at all overnight so just went out and did some speed work at 5:30 in the morning! I have noticed that as the week has gone on my heart rate is about 10 bpm more than it should be. I'm not sure if this is due to the jet lag, overtraining or just an anomaly. This morning I went for another 20 mile long run. It was a bit of a struggle to say the least. A number of issues conspired against me. Firstly I had a serious bout of insomnia last night (not jet lag related, just pure insomnia). Secondly I had plotted a route through Richmond Park. Richmond Park is beautiful and I saw lots of deer and parokeets but it is not at all flat. This pushed my heart rate right up and also meant I expended more energy than normal. I had to stop with 10k to go just to pop into a garage to buy some water. Now, I'm not sure if this is a continuation of the issues I noticed at the end of the last week or just a one-off based on the circumstances described. Anyhow, by the end of the run I was as shattered as I normally am after running a marathon. And this was at a slower pace. I am going to have to monitor how I feel during this week's training very closely indeed. If I think that I am overtraining then I will have to reduce my levels of training as well as reset my expectations for the marathon. I'm hoping it's a one-off!
On a more positive note I haven't gained any weight from being on holiday. So every cloud etc. etc.
Anyway here's my run from this morning, if you drill into it you can see how my heart rate shoots up quite significantly once I started climbing the hill to Richmond Park.
Managed to miss only three training sessions whilst on holiday. Due to being on a fly-drive of the western parts of the US I had to move a lot of the sessions around to match up with locations and temperatures. This meant that I had to do an 18 mile run on the Friday morning that we were due to fly out to LA. I followed this up with 5 miles near the LA airport hotel, another 4 miles in Lake Havasu City (amazingly hot, even at 6am), 10 miles in Williams near the Grand Canyon, 7 miles in Las Vegas (up and down the Strip), 5 miles in Sequoia and another 5 miles in Yosemite. I then did a 20 mile long run on the Tuesday in San Francisco where it was much, much cooler. Considering that in the afternoon we went sightseeing (on segways no less) and went out drinking in the evening I felt fine. My last run was a 5 mile run, in Oxnard, near LA. It was meant to be an 11 mile run but I had stomach problems and had to cut the run short!
Running abroad was both a challenge and exciting. The challenge was trying to fit all the training into the schedule. This involved getting up early (around 6am) so I could get back to the hotel in time to check out and drive to the next location. It also meant that I had to be aware of what I was drinking the night before and couldn't exactly hit the town, but since I was doing pretty much all of the driving I didn't want to be driving in a foreign country on the "wrong" side of the road with a hangover! The exciting aspect was in the variety of the running. In one holiday I have run in the Yosemite and Sequoia national forests, up and down the Las Vegas Strip and across the Golden Gate Bridge. I got to see things that I didn't have a chance to when sightseeing.
Since landing back in the UK I have been following my running schedule closely. The difficulty has been trying to adjust to jet lag. On Tuesday I did not sleep at all overnight so just went out and did some speed work at 5:30 in the morning! I have noticed that as the week has gone on my heart rate is about 10 bpm more than it should be. I'm not sure if this is due to the jet lag, overtraining or just an anomaly. This morning I went for another 20 mile long run. It was a bit of a struggle to say the least. A number of issues conspired against me. Firstly I had a serious bout of insomnia last night (not jet lag related, just pure insomnia). Secondly I had plotted a route through Richmond Park. Richmond Park is beautiful and I saw lots of deer and parokeets but it is not at all flat. This pushed my heart rate right up and also meant I expended more energy than normal. I had to stop with 10k to go just to pop into a garage to buy some water. Now, I'm not sure if this is a continuation of the issues I noticed at the end of the last week or just a one-off based on the circumstances described. Anyhow, by the end of the run I was as shattered as I normally am after running a marathon. And this was at a slower pace. I am going to have to monitor how I feel during this week's training very closely indeed. If I think that I am overtraining then I will have to reduce my levels of training as well as reset my expectations for the marathon. I'm hoping it's a one-off!
On a more positive note I haven't gained any weight from being on holiday. So every cloud etc. etc.
Anyway here's my run from this morning, if you drill into it you can see how my heart rate shoots up quite significantly once I started climbing the hill to Richmond Park.
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