Feeling better

Its the long run - not done anything serious since BM, so need to get this one out of the way.

A cool grey morning, just the weather for plodding.

As a result of BM where my average pace was 13:04 with AHR 146, my plan is to continue to do my training at 140, (apart from my club runs which will be quicker - around race pace) and aim to run at an average pace of around 14 mm - that is to use the Trinity method - make up any spare time at the end of the mile, in walking.


So to try it out. As usual the first few miles were painful - tight calves again, stopped to stretch a couple of times.

Just took water in my hilly bottle carrier and dextrose tablets, rather than gels, which I hate. I failed to push the stopper back down on the bottle after the first slurp and so had a damp back for a while - which made it cold.

But after that it was going pretty steadily up until the killer hill at the end - and I decided to not even try to run that, just to walk up the steeper bits and plod when it levelled off a bit - my back was aching at this point, probably partly because it was cold..

So the numbers

Mile	AHR	Last time	today's pace	today's AHR
1	132	12:29	12:22	131	downhill, looks a bit quick but HR low
2	137	13:25	13:35	132	pretty level
3	139	13:41	13:59	137	rising
4	138	14:33	14:13	136	climbing
5	137	11:29	13:11	134	someone moved the mile markers last time!
6	137	13:29	13:09	138	coming home
7	133	13:57	13:22	136
8	139	13:52	13:28	137	this is uphill
9	136	14:56	15:05	133	main road to cross and killer hill warm down
9.0	136	13:33	13:36	135	2:01:56 2:02:27

so pretty pleased again, managed to keep going even on the hills unless the HR said slow down, and tried to keep running and not walking by decreasing stride, keeping cadence (sounds techy doesn't it!), but sometimes I just have to walk I am afraid.

End of the month
So 68 miles plodded this month, in spite of a week off last week. That is 13 miles more than I did last January - so a bit further on in my training. Just looked back at the spreadsheet for last year, and I missed quite a few of my long runs for various reasons - will really try to make the long runs and the 'kinda long' runs stick this time.