Lots of Sunny Miles

In my last post I said I would try to post once a week about the running I’ve been doing. I’m just going to dive in with the facts and figures:

Total: 28.2 miles, 4 hours 1 minute

The first part of the week was taken fairly easy, because I knew there were lots of miles to come later on in the week. The intervals session on Thursday was pretty good – I did three 1k repetitions (I was contemplating doing a fourth, but it seemed like a bad idea given the mileage volume) at around 3 minutes 50 seconds per kilometre, which is fairly good off a 5k PB of around 21 minutes.

Parkrun was a decent improvement on last week. I think the short recovery run I put in on Friday helped loosen my legs up a bit, and they felt a lot less heavy than the previous week. However, by the end of the race I could feel the increased number of miles that I have been putting in over the last few weeks. I ended up with a course PB, but I definitely think I could go a fair bit quicker with some rest beforehand. Given that the course is mostly shaded and parkrun is early in the morning, I think there’s potential to go faster and faster throughout the summer.

You can tell this was near the start… Photo credit Andy Robbins on Flikr

Sunday was probably the hottest day of the year so far, which naturally made it a the perfect day to run the furthest I have ever run. Given the very warm and sunny conditions and the fairly hilly route, I was pleased with the run overall, despite it being quite slow. The advantage of the warm, sunny weather was that the beautiful Woodford Valley was shown off to me in all its glory. There was a five mile stretch between miles 7 and 12 that I had never run before, which doesn’t happen that often and made a nice change.

Although running that distance is very gruelling – the last few miles of this week’s run were very hard in the baking midday sun – hopefully it will build up my aerobic base and help improve my half marathon times. I was fairly confident that I would break the 100 minute barrier at my last half marathon in Bath, but I came up a little short. I’m hoping that adding these extra long endurance runs, along with generally running more miles, will help me finally break the 100 minute mark, and hopefully allow me to go a fair bit under that.

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