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.
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