Well, the temperature has dropped a bit, but the soles of my feet have been roasting. The rest of me is alright but my feet seem to do this each night in the heat, and I have to drape a cold flannel over so they don’t self-combust. That would not do when I’m supposed to be marathon training.
Yes, this has been a particularly warm week, and I heard that some friends have not run at all. Yesterday’s Parkrun numbers were in the early seven hundreds which is low for Birkenhead Park. I don’t know why, we had a lovely cool breeze every now and then which felt very refreshing after the heavy blanket of heat.
Although it has been hot, I think the Wirral got off lightly compared to the central and southern areas of the country. I even managed to get a long run in on Wednesday. It was slow and I needed more than one comfort break, but that was more because of what I ate the previous evening than anything to do with the weather. It was my longest run to date and gave me a sobering idea of the mountain I have to climb if I want to run my marathon in under five hours.
Including my pauses for the facilities, I did 15.5 miles in three hours and 23 minutes. At ideal race pace it would be around two hours and 57 minutes ish. I know that it’s early in the training, and I’m running much slower to build my legs up and I won’t have eaten Singapore Noodles the night before the marathon, but it does feel daunting.
What was good to experience was that although I was very tired after the run I wasn’t wiped out. After a shower and a fifteen-minute snooze I felt quite human. I even managed a lunch out at The Wheatsheaf, with Anne and her mum, Shirley, who has been staying with us this week while her kitchen gets refitted. That recovery felt more pleasing because it was very warm, even in the early morning, and I only had a little over half a litre of water, alongside three gels.
They say that running in the heat is the poor person’s altitude training. A whole bunch of stuff happens over time to your blood and capillaries that I don’t fully understand, but that seems to make you more efficient at things like delivering oxygen to your muscles, so who knows. Maybe something special is happening to my body, but it is taking a while to show itself.
I have to trust the process. I’m only three weeks done of a sixteen-week build up and although I’m not following someone else’s plan, I am following a plan that will hopefully work for me, keep me consistent and build me up gently – because I’m very fragile, you know. It involves a home strength workout twice a week as a non-negotiable. That is the cornerstone of my consistency I believe.
The second thing is to keep my weekly mileage up. Thirty miles a week in the first month which, after a small drop back next week, I’ll take up to between thirty-three and thirty-five. It’s a tiny increase, as I’ve never kept this kind of mileage up for any length before, so I will just see how I go. Plus, it does take me a long time to do those miles, over six hours for thirty miles, so I’m still toying with the idea of joining a gym soon and doing some swimming or cycling to mix it up a bit. Perhaps someone like me, who is on the slow side, needs to be more wary of overdoing one thing. It’s something to ponder but for now, I’m pleased that I’m doing thirty miles a week comfortably and not feeling tired all the time.
The third part of my plan is the long run. I may have jumped ahead of most other plans by getting a fifteen miler in so soon, but I know that those five simple miles between fifteen and twenty have felt very hard to do in previous marathon training. It’s my way of giving myself a little confidence boost and it did just that. What I plan to do – I didn’t manage it this week because of time – is to run the day after the long run at my ideal marathon pace, so that I’m doing a long run and a short run back-to-back. This is kind of dipping into the Hanson Method philosophy which emphasises building cumulative fatigue rather than doing one super long run. I don’t know if that will work for me, but I will try it for the next two to three weeks and see how it feels.
A lot of this ‘plan’ is about feel. I haven’t subscribed to the Zone 2 Club, but if I have a problem catching my breath then I slow down, and overall, my heart rate seems to have now dropped down on my easy runs to a Zone 2 range without me having to look constantly at my watch.
Will all this work equate to a sub-5 marathon? Well, I don’t know but I will be stronger than I was when I started, if I keep this up, and I may well enjoy running the marathon for longer before it makes me have an existential crisis.
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