Well, at least I’m kind of maintaining a level.
After three weeks of trying, I finally managed to get back to the twelve-mile mark, via a parkrun sandwich on a beautiful spring morning. It’s difficult to believe that I was up to 20-mile runs by this time last year. Okay, a slight exaggeration, I managed one 20-mile run at the beginning of March 23, which felt great, but then I had a bit of an injury afterwards so I didn’t go past a half marathon in my run up to the Manchester Marathon.
This year I have my big event in July, so I have time. It’s the Race To The Stones: 31 miles ish, or 50km. My first, and probably last ultra, given how hard I’m finding the longer distances. It is one of my ‘things to do at 50’, and although it seemed like a good idea at the time, part of me thinks that I could have opted for more luxurious birthday treats.
However, here I am, so I need to get focussed.
The thing about ultras, or so I’ve heard, is that the mentality is completely different to a road marathon. There isn’t really talk about times, unless you’re at the business end. It’s more of a walking picnic. In fact, in this particular ‘race’, there is an option to walk the whole thing.
But even walking at a nice steady pace would take me at least ten hours with no stops and, given that my legs are like jelly after three at the moment, I still have a long way to go.
So, I’m going to run/walk it, just so that I have time to stop and eat a sandwich along the way and go behind the bushes a few times. With that in mind I need to have some sort of training plan, so I’ve sketched the following out:
I’m currently at thirty miles-a-week, and just about at 12/13 miles in one go.
- In April, I’d like to get up to thirty-five miles in the week, with two 15 milers under my belt.
- In May, I’d like to get up to forty miles-a-week, with two 18 milers done.
- In June, I’ll stick to forty miles in the week, with two 20 mile runs.
Easy peasy.
It doesn’t bare any semblance to the plans they suggest, but I know that I can’t increase long runs week by week. I need to build them up more gradually. Their plans do have hill repeats and intervals, and, as from now (because I’ve not specifically been doing them yet), I’ll alternate them once a week.
Plus (and here’s something that I’ve never done until the last few weeks) I’m lifting weights.
I had a really good session with Colin from the club last week, where we did a mix of heavy weights, resistance moves, and jumping on to a box (surprisingly hard – although he did keep increasing the height of the box). It all made me ache for two days but in a good way. We did it like a circuit, and not as repeated reps; just ten of everything and moving on to the next thing, which stopped it being dull and repetitive. I’m hoping that doing something like this once a week will feed into my running, and get my bone density a bit more, well, dense. Very important for us women.
The ‘plan’ will commence on Tuesday as it’s the Easter weekend, as you can see from all the large ears at Parkrun.
theleadlesspencil 
Sounds good. If someone follows a 4 hour marathon training plan and runs it in 3h 45m, they won’t complain. If someone follows the plan and runs it in 4h 15m, they may be quite unhappy – to my mind, this is likely to mean that training plans err on the cautious side (ie a bit overloaded with the training). While following the principles of a plan is good, I’ve never got too stressed by not following a plan slavishly.
I’m rubbish at most training plans for marathons because they start off with quite low mileage and ramp it up too quickly, but that just kills me. We shall see how my ‘plan’ pans out