Every four weeks or so in any training plan, there should be a cut-back week. Perhaps not quite as cut back as I had this week, but it’s supposed to help your body consolidate all the training it has had in the previous few weeks, so you can go again the following week.
I’m writing this on Monday afternoon, and I haven’t done any ‘going again’ yet as we’ve just come back from Center Parcs (it’s taken me ages to get the spelling right as I keep trying to correct it). It was the starting weekend of half term, so two of the grandsons, their mum and dad, and the two of us spent a weekend at the one in the north of England.
That was only from Friday to Monday, so why only the measly sixteen miles in the entire week? It was supposed to be a cut-back, not a drastic cut-in-half. A cut-back suggests a slight easing up, perhaps a drop in mileage by twenty percent, or at most a third.
In my defence, your honour, I did go to bed with the sniffles on Monday night. It seemed to ebb and flow all week, making a small dent in my tissue box, and occasionally threatened to come forth and declare itself as a fully-fledged cold, but by Friday, it had packed up and snuffed off thankfully. While it had hung around, I’d had a slightly greater attack of the CBAs than I normally did.
However.
Let me pull this defeatist talk back just a little bit and tell you just what I did manage to do.
I did manage to do two rounds of some sort of strength and conditioning workouts. I did manage one threshold session, if you include Parkrun, and one hill repeats session. So, it’s not a complete loss. If I had managed to squeeze in a long run, it would have been a perfectly acceptable week.
The long run, though, when you’re training for a long race, is crucial, I guess. But do you have to do it every week? I may just re-arrange my training week to a training fortnight (those kinds of plans do apparently exist). I think that kind of behaviour might be useful for when you’re getting longer miles in for marathon training, or if you’re starting out, but really, all I’ve done is one ten-miler, once, in the whole four weeks, if you think about it.
So I really need to pull my finger out in the next four weeks, starting from today. Or maybe from tomorrow.
| Mon | Yoga |
| Tue | 40 mins – S & C and weights |
| Club Run – just over an hour. | |
| Wed | Nothing |
| Thu | 60 mins – S & C and weights |
| Fri | A lot of squats in the water as I was helping the elder grandson to swim |
| Sat | Penrith Parkrun – at a huffing and puffing pace, plus a big, long warm up and a bit of warm down – all in all an hour ish. |
| Sun | Yet more water squat work, some running laps on the indoor rapids, and an occasional stroke here and there. |
| Pine tree trails hill repeats – half an hour ish |
theleadlesspencil 