Building up the Miles

I didn’t do a weekly training report post last week, mainly because I spent didn’t do any vaguely interesting running last week, and also because I was quite hungover on Sunday after spending Saturday in London watching rugby for a friend’s birthday.

So I’m going to talk about two weeks worth of running this week instead of just the one, although most of the focus will be on the second of the two weeks.

All this means that I get to punctuate my musings with two poorly-formatted tables instead of just one!

Week 1

Total: 22.4 miles, 3 hours 8 minutes

Week 2

Total: 26.4 miles, 3 hours 30 minutes

The main focus of the last two weeks has been building up solid miles, mostly at “easy” pace – somewhere around 1 minute a mile slower than my target 10k race pace. The general consensus is that the more miles you do, the faster you race, and the more miles you do at a slower pace, the less chance you have of getting injured or “over-training”, whatever that means.

With that in mind, the only hard effort over the past few weeks (apart from a few “tempo” miles to remind myself what running vaguely fast feels like) was Salisbury parkrun. Given the slow pace of the previous few ones and the shiny new shoes in my possession, I felt good about my chances of pushing down my parkrun time.

Hands in full-on gimp mode, as per. Photo credit Andy Robbins on Flikr

My confidence proved fairly well founded. The parkrun course has recently switched over to the summer route, which means three laps instead of four, and some sections on grass. I don’t mind running on grass, but the grass sections on this route are quite uneven under foot, and there are quite a lot of low branches to navigate. This not only requires extra concentration and spacial awareness, but makes running fast a bit more technically difficult. However, I set off fairly well with a fast first mile, and hung on for the remaining two miles to get a Salisbury parkrun PB! I would’ve liked to go under 21 minutes (21:00 is my overall PB), but didn’t quite have the sprint to manage it. I think I’d be able to go a fair bit quicker on a flat, tarmac course, but only time will tell.

The only other run worth mentioning was the 9 miler the day after the parkrun. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary, but given that I had run hard the previous day, the sun was beating down, and the hills are steep and plentiful in the Woodford Valley, I was pleased with how comfortable I found the 8:00 pace – what I would call my “steady” pace. A year ago, I probably couldn’t have managed that effort level in those circumstances, certainly not without severe discomfort! It’s nice to see progress in various areas, hopefully the times will continue to fall over the summer and into the autumn.

If you want to see more details of these runs and runs from previous weeks, check out my Strava profile.