Road bump

Well, I have hit a road bump this week, week 2 into my Edinburgh base training plan and things were going well. 

On Tuesday I had made it to Derwent runners, had a great 6 miles steady run, got to explore a lot more of Derby and knew I would be back, 4 miles on Thursday morning and was all set for my long run on Friday.  Then Thursday came, I woke up and had a tickly cough but pressed on for my 4 miles treadmill run, however, as the day wore on I started to go downhill quickly and apparently I was looking rather rough (and that was them being nice).

Fast forward to the evening and I am huddled up on the sofa, in three layers of clothes, surrounded by tissues, sipping a very special hot toddy, which is only making do until I can take my hit of night nurse and go to bed.

I have come down with this horrible cold that is going around at the minute, the news on the street is that it lasts for at least a week! I really hope not. Fortunately, at the minute, I don’t work Fridays so it meant I could take up permanent residency on the sofa for the rest of the day. I gave myself a long lie in, got dressed and settled down for a day of Wanted Down under, RipOff Briton (Holiday edition) and the box set of "The Good Doctor" which was a bit of a lifesaver (pun indented).

Needless to say that I am taking the week of my training plan and when I feel well enough I will get back to it…

Not going to sweat it and I have a good running buddy who is going through something a lot worse, so a little cold is not going to keep this girl down for too long, I'll be up and running in no time.

My take on 2018

It's been a funny old year, it started with me not running at all during January😏and has finished with me running every day in December, with a grand total of 135😮

This year I decided to participate in the advent run for December deciding that running every day up to the 25th sounded achievable.  Then, of course, there is the Christmas Day parkrun, next running to pick the car up on Boxing Day and then before you know it there is only 5 days to go and it would be a shame to miss out on running every day for a month.  

  

December, I have clocked my highest mileage month for the year; the miles have not been quick by my previous standards (btw they were never that quick but quicker than now).  People keep asking if I have turned a corner with my running and I’m really not too sure, I do enjoy it more now so perhaps I have.

The BIG question did I achieve have achieved any of my pre-marathon training plan goals?  

• Run 4/5 times a week,  
• A 10-mile run at\za least once 
• Run over 25 miles a week consistently 👍( I think the advent run really helped with that one!)

Looking back over the year and although the miles have been lower than in previous years I have had a lot of great times. Spent time with friends, celebrated weddings, births of babies and travelled halfway across the world to Australia! I have parkran 17 times, being parkrun run director 14 times, volunteered a further 9 times and also sneaked in some tourism to Isabel Trail, Cairns, Bicester and Cannock Chase. 

In terms of what 2019 holds for me: I am stgarting well with a parkrun double run day, then hopefully off to Mexico in March, with a marathon in May, a van life trip to Scotland in July and the Great North Run in September.  I'm going to try another open water triathlon at some point and improve both my time and experience of the swim.  

I've a plan to help achieve the goal of running the marathon with a training plan and a strategy to help me get more miles in the week. I will be (hopefully) joining Derwent Runners as a social member which means I should regularly get 6 miles outside in on a Tuesday.

In terms of the open water swimming, I have had an online chat with a seasoned Iron distance veteran and he has given me some great advice which I will be able to follow when open water swimming opens in the spring.

The other thing I hope to do more is blogging about how my training is going and my other musing that come to me on my runs.

Hope you all have had a great or at least as good as it could have been 2018 and here is looking at 2019 head on and tackling whatever is thrown at us.     
                    

Getting slower to get better ??

Apologies for lack of posting we have been away on holiday to OZ for a couple of weeks and then I've been finishing off jobs around the house while waiting for my next contract to start. This has been great as I have been able to get plenty of running in.

However, as you may be seen from my earlier posts I have a recurrent injury both a physical one and a prolonged issue with my CBA* muscle! So after what I would like to think of as divine intervention, by way of my many recently listened to podcasts, the concept of heart rate training has come up on the radar again. 

I have tried and failed many times in the past to run to heart rate (HR) as I felt ridiculous going out so slowly and felt that people would judge me for my pace.  Not I that I have ever bothered  Jo Pavey or Paula Ratcliffe with my times, however, the fear was real. 

So last week I started out trying to run in zone 2 which was a big struggle and the only zone I could semi maintain was zone 3…which is not really following the rules of HR training However by being in zone 3 it was still 12+ min milling so I felt justified. But the problem was my heart rate would spike into zone 4 and I would have to stop and walk or just stop altogether for my HR to come back down into zone 2/3. Once this had happened I would start off and within minutes it would spike again.  Equally the HR alert I set up on my watch was getting annoying and I was convinced that it wasn't helping to keep my HR down. 

In an effort to keep the HR rate,  I switched to pace rather than HR; with the aim to keep my pace above 10:00 mins miles, so my watch alert would only tell me if I was going too fast.  Not truly HR training but when I reviewed at the data and compared the run to the same run a couple of days before my pace averaged out to 11min miles and the percentage I was in zone 3 was better than the last run, as you can see. 

Having said all of that, today I went out again a slightly shorter route, granted a few more hills but it was a struggle to keep both my HR and pace where they needed to be. It is a bit of trial and error which I have time for as my target for this year is purely about consistency and other than the holiday which did throw a dent into the consistency plan I have been regularly running 4-5 times a week. 

What is next??  to keep to the to pace training for all my runs excluding any quality running and see how I get on….however, I am hiding all of my runs on Strava so only I know……..

*CBA = Can't Be Arse