HM Training – Week 1 of 9

Good things 

• I managed just over twenty-seven miles this week, and as I haven’t done that since the second week of November last year, I’m quite pleased.
• By virtue of two races – alright Parkrun isn’t a race, but you know what I mean – I managed two quite decent threshold runs.
• There was an interval session.
• There was a hill session.
• There were two strength and conditioning sessions

Not so good things

• The most I ran in one go was a six-miler on Tuesday. So, there were no proper long runs this week.
• My interval session was rather short – I managed five and a half intervals instead of the planned ten.
• The pool was closed this weekend when I woke myself up ridiculously early to get there before Parkrun.
• My period, possibly, started again this morning – two weeks after the last one. Need to really start on the HRT.

So:

What constitutes a long run?
For what I’m aiming for, I’m wanting to be doing between nine and fifteen miles over these weeks.

What’s a threshold run for me?
Where all the miles are below nine and a half minutes. Granted, today there was a great big 12:25 minute mile during my Borders Race today but that was a steep swine of a hill, so I’m not going to beat myself up about it, although I’ve just seen my stats for when I did this run in February 2024, and I’m a lot slower this time by nearly two minutes, so maybe I’ll need to just put my head in my hands for a bit and cry. 

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The Borders Race – An Aside

Somehow or other, I’ve got myself into a position of responsibility at Pensby Runners. Which has resulted in helping to try and organise our runners for races like the Borders League. We needed to have six women running today to avoid getting penalised, but for a myriad of reasons we only really had three.

By a process of begging and bribery (cake, not cash) we managed to get three further walking-wounded Pensby women to the start. I’m not quite sure why, in a running group that has nearly two hundred members, it is so hard to get volunteers, but this time we scraped by with injuries and illnesses and three heroes keeping the team together.

The Connah’s Quay race is one I’ve done before, as I’ve already alluded to, but I had forgotten about the hill. Emily had remembered.

‘I’m worried about the hill.’
‘Is there a hill?’ I asked, having obviously compartmentalising the trauma to the dustbin of my brain.

There was a hill. A proper lung-buster. Let’s see if I forget it the next time.

Aside from that, and possibly even because of it, as a good course always has a bit of variety, it was a very good course. Short, at four and a half miles, but that just pushes you to go a bit faster. The final section was back on the track and I almost caught up with the guy in front, before a woman came rocketing past the two of us.

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But really,

I know that hills are my Achilles heel and getting those bad boys in on a regular basis is going to be one of the secrets of my success – if I have any success. And for half marathon training, a decent long run must happen at least every ten days to two weeks in my opinion, just to keep the stamina up, so if I squeeze one in by Wednesday, that will do me.

Week one is complete, and I did start well-ish.  The trick now is to keep up the momentum and not fall back to my slow jogging all the time.

Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun
18 mins – Jog to gym	20 mins – Yoga		70 mins – S & C		28:54 parkrun	5 mins – warm up
24 mins – Intervals			15 mins – swim			43:03 Borders Race
40 mins – S & C		20 mins – Yoga		20 mins – Yoga
15 mins -swim
60 mins – walk/run	70 mins – relaxed club run		60 mins – club run with hills

I could have a more detailed chart above with mileage breakdowns and the minutiae of my strength and conditioning etc, but I won’t bore you rigid.