Nothing In Particular

Looking at the date of my last post I realise that it has been a while. 

The last time it was about my lurgy and me feeling somewhat sorry for myself. I don’t want to lead you to thinking that I’ve been keeping the duvet firmly wrapped around me in some stinking morass of germs for all that time. It’s been tempting to follow that path because my cough and (now newly acquired) cold are still hanging around. Not quite in full attack mode any more at least, more like digging in to defensive positions. So, I have stuck my head above the parapet and continued with my life’s activities, whilst sneezing and hacking at occasional moments.

I have mainly been writing.

I’ve not done a blog for a while because I have been quite busy working on the second stage of my novel-writing adventure, which is the ‘first edit’. This basically means that I’ve managed to produce a full(ish) ‘first draft’ and now I’m going through the chapters and amending/adding/deleting bits so that the whole thing sounds a bit more coherent. Because the first draft took ages, my characters have changed a bit as I’ve gone along. Either their names, personalities, actions, or all of the above have had to be amended to fit my final thoughts.

It’s all still a bit messy, but I’ve been churning out a chapter or two on most days in the last two weeks for Anne to read, which for me is excellent productivity. It’s always good to have the first read-through done by someone who’s going to be on your side no matter what. Good for the fragile ego when it gets closer to the stage when ‘other people’ will start reading it.

I have also been running. 

The Cross-Country season has begun, and I managed to get third Pensby woman in the first fixture. The fact that there were only three Pensby women running that race is neither here nor there, any chance that I can to get on the podium I will take. 

As part of our club road league, several of us became tourists at Croxteth Park Parkrun in Liverpool. I was nowhere near any kind of podium during this run, but I did have a terrific catch up with Stan Cottier who runs with Liverpool Running Club and who is one of the people I see on a regular basis during inter club races like the Cross-Country. He also kept me honest by making me put the effort in for a decent progression run.

I’ve ditched my coach. Not because he wasn’t any good, I thought he was great, but because Christmas is coming and I’m brassic already. I really enjoyed not having to think about my training for that month and just let someone else set up my sessions. Of course, it meant that I actually had to do those sessions because someone else was looking over my shoulder, but I guess that is the point. It is too short a time to see if I have progressed but two really good takeaways from the experience have been:

• add some strides to the end of all easy runs
• mix up the interval durations

With the first one, it doesn’t really impact on time, but it does show me just how my normal range of movement when I’m running is quite small, and hopefully these strides will improve my general form over time. With the second, working out my planned pace for a distance or a time was a learning curve to make sure I was working myself but not dying before I got to the end. The more I do it, hopefully the more knowledgeable I’ll get with my pacing abilities.

I had planned to work towards improving my 5K time with this coaching, but because my lurgy knocked me back a little, I’ve decided not to worry about when I’m going to test it. Obviously, we have Parkrun so I can give that a go every now and then and keep doing a couple of sessions of lung-exploding training each week, but I won’t have a count down because now that I’m back to making up my own training plan I’m less likely to stick to it. For example, today, after many days of ridiculously warm weather the rain is falling and the temperature has dropped noticeably, so my planned 5 x 1K efforts has not occurred. Neither has my weights, which I could have done under cover, but…chose not to.

What I have been doing today is some of the course material for the Leadership In Running Fitness (LIRF) qualification, the bottom rung of the coaching ladder, but useful to have for the basics. Our club, thanks to some excellent social media engagement from some of our crew, seems to be collecting a few more new members, and we will be needing more coaches to support them, or at least people who have training in that first rung. I’m not sure I want the responsibility of being a proper coach, but I am currently helping out with the Couch to 5K group so I figured it would be a good opportunity to get a little learning done on the back of that.