Trailplus weekend

A great weekend again.

Lots of forumites - and, especially, lots of waisters, who really are the best friends you could ask for.

Friday
The drive down was enlivened by travelling with XB (driver), daffy and EF, and RB following and then meeting up with Pix at the services, so a convoy of three proceeded to the Forest of Dean.

It had been a hard week, so I passed on the evening run, knowing the legs would be doing plenty of work over the weekend.

The weekend consisted of a mixture of talks and practical sessions, with the aim of enabling you to put together a tranining programme to sut your needs. And as they work on time on feet, rather than distance run, the advice given can apply to everybody.

The people there were targeting everything from 2:30-2:45 times to 6 hours (me) - there were also people there who do not currently have a marathon on the horizon and some might never, but the advice was good for all runners, particularly endurance runners.

Saturday
So an early morning pre-breakfast 'recovery' run to get the metabolism going and theoretically raise your metabolism for the rest of the day - and help fat burning (sounds good to me)

A talk on the elements of an endurance programme:
Sunday: long run at 65-75% MRH
Monday: Rest or Recovery run (40 minutes @ 60-65%) or cross train 60 minutes
Tuesday: Kenyan Hills - steady up and down starting with 20s up and 10 reps and then increasing length and reps
Wednesday: Rest or Recovery or cross train
Thursday: Threshold run at 80-85%
Friday: Rest day
Saturday: Fartlek/marathon pace run/threshold run

have a step back week every fourth week, build up slowly, include plenty of stretching and core strength
every session starts with a warm up walk and jog for 10 minutes and warm down jog at the end

Then out to practice threshold running - splitting into groups our plodders group did 5 x 2 minutes at 80% HR - looks good on the garmin data!

shower and lunch

digest lunch whilst listening to a talk on nutrition - nothing new really, just reinforcing good habits

out to practice Kenyan Hills - which are not several reps of Mount Kilimanjaro but steady running up and down hills, rather than traditional eyeballs out stuff

the hill looked much like my killer hill that goes on for a mile! I cannot imagine doing reps up and down the A6 though

and back for a practical session on stretching

and a talk on personal training plans

and a good dinner - unless you were a garlic-hating vegetarian!

Sunday
no early run so breakfast then a talk about the long run - and a clearly stated belief that no one should be doing more than 3 hours running in training - more marathons are ruined by peaking with a long run that is not is done too hard and does not allow time for recovery

so on this theory I crashed at mile 18 because I ran 18 miles in 4 hours with Ruth three weeks out, not because I did not run 20 miles

so having ignored the advice last year to not run more than 3 hours, this year I am going to take it!

and then the long run - out for 1:38 , lots of pauses to regroup; some walking because our legs were feeling the effects of threshold and hills, we had a lovely damp morning in the forest

a final shower, lunch and then a talk about tapering and The Last Week - how to run perfect marathons!

and its time to go home

a great weekend - 13 miles plodded, some of it quickly!

and a new schedule sorted