Thursday 2015/06/18. No time for my run because I had too much work to do. ------ Saturday 2015/06/20. Did a nice gentle parkrun, but my blasted knee still hurt. The plan had been to do a six mile run afterwards, but I'd forgotten that it was the annual men versus women relay race afterwards! It was a 5k race with 25 on each team, doing a 200 metre dash then handing on the baton to the next runner. 200 metres is a tricky distance when you're not used to it, because it isn't quite a flat-out sprint. And I had one of the steeper climbs on the course, so I had to pace myself a bit. It was all great fun. Would have done my longer run on the next Sunday instead, but I was up half the night at a party, so I really didn't feel like doing a great deal the next day!
Tuesday 2015/06/23. Running club: practise session for next week's Summer Mile. After a couple of gentle warm-up runs, we ran the mile course as quickly as we could three times, with a short break inbetween eeach one whil eour heartbeats came back down 120. The idea being to try to keep the speed as close to the first one as possible, making ourselves work a bit harder each time. I got it very close on the second one, but after two sprint finishes I was a bit slow on the third! But my time on the first to was quite well within my time on last year's event, so at least I should do a good PB next week! And of course it's a very good excercise for fitness too. Someone suggested to me before that doing one mile intervals is a good training excercise for distnace running and not just for speed. I'm tempted to try it on my own, but I know that I'm much better at pushing myself when I'm with a group and I've got other runners to use as 'targets'. On my own I'm better at just pootling along.
Thursday 2015/06/24. Did my regular six-mile circular run starting and finishing at my house. But the Strava app didn't start recording until I was nearly halfway round! I don't know whether the problem lies with the app or with the GPS on my phone. I suspect probably the latter. Anyway, I started very gently to warm up my sore knee. After a while I hit on the idea that since I was taking the descents very gently to protect my knee, I would run the climbs quicker and use the descents and the flat bits for recovery. Turned it into a sort of low-intensity interval session, and I really enjoyed it. On top of Tuesday's session though it left me with seriously tired quads! But my knee felt fine by the end, so I'm generally feeling pretty happy right now.
Saturday 2015/06/27. parkrun - did a gentle 5k in 27:10, which is as near as damn it 9mpm. Then after grabbing a bit of water I did a six mile run with a few long climbs, but nothing too severe. It was a warm morning, and by the end I was absolutely pouring with sweat. I think from now on I'll just do three and four mile loops with quick water breaks inbetween. Stopping isn't ideal, but getting dehydrated increases the risk of injury, and water stations will be at about four mile intervals in the marathon, so I might as well replicate that in training. PS: my knee didn't hurt very badly , and only for a short while, so that is really good news. But now my back hurts. I'm just a poor decrepit old man...!
Tuesday 2015/06/30: running club. In order to be fresh(ish) for my mile race tomorrow, I planned on dropping down a couple of groups. In the end I decided that the pace that group was intending to do would be just too slow, so I went with the group just one below my usual one. Since the group had no official back-marker, I decided to fill in there. We ran along the canal, but it turned out that far from being a bit cooler down that way it was actually airless and sweltering hot. One lass was struggling a bit, so having abck-marker turned out to be worthwhile. She wanted to quit and run back along the canal on her own, but we advised her that that would be extremely unwise. There have been attacks on single women there. Once we left the canal we found a nice cool breeze, and the run got a lot pleasanter! Had a nice gentle pootle round, and ended up walking the last mile with a friend who was also struggling in the heat. Hopefully I'll have bags of energy left for tonight's mile race - although the forecast is for it to be even hotter than yesterday!
Johnno, I live that way. I average 3 shirts and one trouser change in a pickup game of basketball at the rec centre. How do you define sweltering heat in a place that considers 34 a heatwave? Try 36 - 37C as a summertime average. With high humidity ( my personal bane ), I might add. Just to put it in perspective
I understand what you are saying, but at the end of the day it's really a matter of what you are used to. And the most difficlut bit about the weather over here is that it changes so much that it's very hard to get used to anything!
Wednesday 2015/07/01: annual summer mile races. This is a really nice event which our club hosts every year. It sold out a while ago and it was great to see so many friends from other clubs. I thought that I had done quite a good job of getting hydrated beforehand, but within a quarter of a mile I was desperately thirsty. All I could think about as I ran round was water! Didn't think I'd done as quickly as I did in the practise sessions last week, so was stagggered to find that I'd actually run it about twenty seconds quicker, which is at least half a minute quicker than I ran it last year. It's always a tricky one to judge, because it's an unfamiliar distance and although each heat is grouped by predicted times, people's predictions can be a bit unreliable, and so each heat can end up getting a bit spread out. That means you don't always get familiar 'targets' to help you pace yourself.
You aren't going to wind me up over that! I've been to USA-land and I know that you get far greater extremes of weather over there. Over here it's often the humidity that really gets to you in the summer, but I've never known humidity to touch what I experienced in Long Island, NY. That was just insane.
The humidity down here in the SE is absolutely horrendous. I've been in the desert SW (Southern Arizona, New Mexico) where the temperatures had been known to reach 47 C and I'n tell you that personally I find that much more comfortable than that boiling in one's own custard feeling, the choking, saturated oppression at 30 C with high humidity. I know it doesn't bother many people but something in my physiology finds it unbearable.
Saturday 2015/07/04. Did the usual gentle parkrun, but slightly quicker than usual. (Did roughly 8.5 minute miles, rather than 9's.) Then after a quick water break I went and did my 'long' run. The overnight thunderstorms had cooled the air, and with a very fine drizzle coming down it was a really lovely morning for running. So I decided to do the seven mile loop that I had plotted many weeks ago, rather than two smaller loops totalling seven miles. I did this for the simple reason that I really fancied doing the seven mile route, and this would probably be my last chance to incorporate it into my marathon training schedule. I enjoyed the run, but the steep climbs left me pretty tired, so from now on I'm going to stick to the relatively flat shorter loops which I've planned, with water breaks inbetween each one of course.
No, I'm just a road runner (baby!) I do do the occasional path, and I have done some mixed terrain events, but things like cross-country, trail and fell running aren't really my thing. I tend to see them as novelty events!
Tuesday 2015/07/07. Running club, monthly hill sprint session. Took the first climb steadily, because it's REALLY long and steep, so I use it as a warm-up. After that, I tried to go full-bore for as long as I could on every climb. Which worked very well overall, except that I had to slow right down on one climb about two-thirds of the way through, because as as soon as I started sprinting my left ankle started hurting really badly. So I took that one steadily, and the next one at sort of medium pace, and after that it felt okay to go back to sprinting them. It was a great workout, and today I feel tired-but-in-a-good-way. The only snag is that my knee feels a bit swollen again and my ankles are a bit sore. I reckon that hill sprints are great for the cardio and the muscles, but a bit hard on the poor old joints!
Saturday 2015/07/11. Did a nice steady parkrun then headed off for two laps of a four mile circuit of my own devising, with quick water stops inbetween. (Total distance eleven miles.) The zip on my running shorts got stuck, so I couldn't get at my phone to turn off the Strava app until I had driven home. So it had recorded a total of thirteen and a half miles, with the last two and a half being done at about 3.5minute mile pace! I followed a suggestion which someone made in another thread and tried having a cold bath afterwards to reduce swollenness in my joints. Now I understand why elderly people can be prone to heart attacks in cold weather. A very unpleasant exerience, and it doesn't seem to have made much difference. I was exhausted after the run, and I think that missing my Thursday morning run didn't help. I really need to stay off things like MAP and Facebook and get more work done early in the week, to free up enough time for a run every Thursday morning!
Tuesday 2015/07/14, running club. Group 5, but with a different group leader this week. His plan was to do 8.5s on the climbs and 8's on the flat. We averaged just over 8.5 for our 6.5 miles, so there must have been even more climbs than I realised! He also threw in some interval work half way round. The whole session was very tiring, and I felt like I got a really good workout. Had a good chat with a chap who I know slightly, but who I didn't know has done marathons all over Europe. Picked his brains about training plans and so forth. I always think that whatever you are learning, you can never speak to too many people about it. You can learn all sorts of snippets of information, which you then pick and choose from and combine into your own plan.
Thursday 2015/07/16. Did my familiar local run. For some reason it recorded as 6.4 miles rather than 6.0. But the average pace was 9:05 mpm, which is a bit quicker than usual. I've tended to be around 9.5 in the past.
