Not a particularly exciting post today as it was just listed in the schedule as a gentle 4miler as a precursor to the Long Short Run I will be doing tomorrow. These (normally) Saturday runs seem a little peculiar to me and didn’t feature at all last year in my own training – the schedule has these short sub 5M runs every week and I guess they must have them for a reason!

Anyway not much to report, treadmill run, 40 mins or so 6.4km pre work session followed by a quick steam then done. I’m not really sure what to do about tomorrows run, the ‘schedule’ has me down to do 9M over 86 mins however this seems to be regressing when it comes to distance so I’m going to adhere to the pace they recommend but extend it to about 14 miles or that of the W6 schedule (2hr 15mins). Not sure what route I will do but to be safe I intend a bit of a loop bringing me back to near the flat at around 10/11M just in case! Will blog tomorrow with an update, hopefully be out on the roads by 9ish.

As an aside I follow Liz Yelling on Twitter and notice she was involved in a podcast which I listened to this morning, apart from the odd sound issues which I’ll ignore as it’s a first show it has it wasn’t too bad. For all you commuters out there with iPhones and iPods subscribe and have a listen, it may motivate you into doing another run when excuses are being made I hope his flourishes into a nice weekly podcast, see www.marathontalk.com for more info.

Yesterday I had to finally admit to skipping on a days training. I’m clearly not 100%, feeling poorly and very heady. I had planned on getting up early and doing the 10k on the road as on Tues the ground was starting to look a lot less slippy. On weds I woke up to another overnight snow dump and coupled with my feeling ill I decided the rest day would be most useful for me.

Weds schedule was a 10km slow and today was a brisk/jog interval split. I figured the intervals may have been more useful for me so opted to skip the slow and go for the later:
1.6km @ 10.9km/h
3.2km @ 14-15.5km/h
1.6km @ 10km/h

True to tradition of a runner had some odd twinges in my left leg, going to put that down to the increased training I’m doing! Did use the foam roller today to massage my leg a bit when I finished to try remove the knots…

Tomorrow is the short warm-up to Saturdays ‘long run’ hopefully take it nice and slow and get me going!

Till next time…

Finally back inline with the schedule I set of to the gym for my allocated interval session. I always intended on doing a number of my interval sessions on the treadmill as I believe I can push the speed a lot more than I would be able to do on the streets.

The RW schedule is actually quite a toughy with the splits having a distance of 1.5miles armed with the worst case speeds I headed for a lunchtime gym session across the road from work. I have had to tailor these plans a little to fit into the hour that I’m allocated and have sacrificed the warmup and down distances to allow me a run of less than 50mins giving me 10mins or so to change and get back. The run today went as follows:
1km warmup @ ~10.5km/h
3×2.4km fasts @ 12-15.5km/h (800me recovery @ 10.5)
1km warmdown.

I really tested myself on the fasts today, breaking them into 3 sections 1km@ 15km/h, 1km@14.5km/h and 0.4km@15.5km/h. I’m aware none of these speeds are achievable on the street but it’s worth pushing myself and my heart rate! On the final interval I even put in a bit more raising the speed to around 17km/h but not for too long!

Good session today, worryingly I can feel a blister starting to form on my left big toe so need to watch that, but in stark contrast to yesterday. Did the 10k in under 48mins and baring in mind that includes a 1km warmup that’s not too bad!

6m slow run tomorrow, hopefully won’t be too bad, only concern is my lack of a rest day!