Trying To Stay Consistent

It’s always nice on a Sunday afternoon when your week has gone by, pretty much, in the way that you’d hoped. Of course, that assumes that you have set out a plan at the beginning of the week and I have been slack with that of late.

Aside from one blip when I ran the Four Villages Half, my weekly mileage has been in the low teens since December, and I have been struggling to get out there with any consistency. However, what runs I have been doing have been pretty hard work, and I have, in the last couple of weeks, got back to my twice-weekly strength training sessions. Because of these, I’m beginning to notice the difference in my legs.

By ‘hard work’ I mean hilly. For example, last weekend I went up in the Welsh hills with my club mate Jo, to do a recce of an upcoming half marathon. It’s a fell half marathon, not a road half marathon, so we’re not talking exactly 13.1 miles. More like fourteen with a bit of change. We managed eleven of the miles as part way up we both realised that we haven’t got the fitness yet to do the full route. And I’m glad we did cut it short because my legs would have been unfit for anything for rest of the week. As it was, my quads were sore for a good couple of days, but it was that nice soreness that tells you that you haven’t damaged anything, you’ve just worked a bit harder than normal.

Unsurprisingly after that though, I didn’t manage a mid-week long run, but I crawled out a seven something miles on Wednesday in inclement weather, which will do. 

I also had a promotional three-day pass for Wirral Council gyms so I had a go at that swimming lark. Swimming is hard, and quite boring but I’m pleased that I can still do a full length of front crawl without drowning or even spluttering. I will join up to the gym for real but probably in March. 

My plan for this week did include Iain’s Intervals on Thursday but the weather was looking grimy and there was our monthly club track session on Friday. I can’t do both so close to each other, so the track won. If you’ve never been running on a track it is well worth a try. The tartan ground is ever so slightly bouncier than tarmac, and you can’t get lost. Plus, because it is flat, you can have a go at working on your pacing, which is a work in progress for me. This week, the coach Matt, had us going from two minutes to 30 seconds in decreasing increments with recovery jog/walk/lie down times in between. Because we have such a wide range of ability in our club, doing the intervals by time rather than distance means that everyone can run at their level. I, for example, felt like my lungs were inside out whilst being lapped continuously by many of the other runners, but it meant that we all got the work out that was right for us.

To compensate, on Saturday, I did the Parkrun at a conversational pace with Victoria. I was trying to persuade her to come back to Tuesday club nights as she wasn’t sure she could do longer than 5K since having her son Arthur. We now have a regular relaxed paced five miles every week at around twelve-minute miles, so I knew she’d have no problem building up her distance again with that given that we were chatting away at ten-minute miles. So, between that and working out how to eat well with time-poor lives, we were at the finishers funnel without really thinking about it. 

And finally, this morning, I got out of bed for the Sunday run. This has to be the one that builds up my strength. We didn’t get the sand this time because the tide was in, but the gnarly tree roots, the loose stones and the mud along a very ‘undulating’ route made for a terrific ankle workout. We normally pause at Thurstatston Visitors Centre for a non-wild wee and then carry on for at least another two miles but then Rob said he was heading back via Bebington, so I was very happy to cut the run short and jump in his car.

The week is complete and my legs are tired but not in a horrible way. I know I can go again tomorrow, but I’ll give them a rest until Tuesday. I tipped over into the twenties with a twenty-one mile weekly mileage. If I can keep doing this for a few weeks on the trot, then I’ll definitely be moving forward.