Another Saturday and another 10 mile run which left me despondent at my apparent inability to run a half decent pace. Again I met up with Mike Scott for this session which I decided would be easy mile, hard mile, repeat repeat repeat until done. None of my 'fast' miles were inside 6 minutes and with my easy miles at about 7 minutes the total was just inside 67 minutes for the whole run. The big difference this week was that my lungs weren't hurting whilst running and I didn't feel poorly afterwards.
I remarked to Scotty that I was never able to run sessions well so early in the morning (we went at 0830) and he suggested I needed to be more selfish and run when it best suited me, even though he probably wouldn't be able to join me later in the morning. A good point and one I will go with.
Fells beckoned again on Sunday. Last week up Fairfiled was nearly 2 hrs so I figured a 3 hour run would be suitable this time out. Handily, it takes about 3 hours to run leg one of the Bob Graham Round. It's also quite close to home and knowing it pretty well means no need to bother with maps and stuff.
Cumbrian Ultra runner extraordinaire Stephen Weston joined me for this run. Good job he did too otherwise it might have been me who fell into a bog above the knees and not Wes!
We cheated a wee bit on the BGR route by starting at the Blencathra Centre, dropping down to the river then up over the rear of Lattrig to gain the tourist path to Skiddaw. After Gt Calva comes Blencathra from the summit of which we enjoyed a spectacular run Westwards along the ridge to naturally drop back down to our start point.
The 9th consecutive day of red hot sunny weather saw me and Scamp take in the 7 mile riverbank run on Monday afternoon - we stopped often to let Scamp drink from the river (and swim in it)
A trip across to Newcastle on Tuesday afternoon saw cloudy and much cooler weather. Not back in the West though - hot and sunny again. So I waited until 6 o'clock to go running....
I was thinking of doing a 6 mile effort run, ideally with a faster second half. Only problem would be if it was windy or hilly, then it might be faster or slower due to factors other than the effort input. So I jogged a mile out to the 3 mile loop and ran that twice.
Had we still been in late March I would have been confident of running 6 miles at well below six minute miling. With my recent dip in form of late though I figured 6 pace would be the target. I also intended to run the second one faster then the first - to simulate a hard race where you remain strong, rather than get slower like a race when you set off too fast and fade.
The results were
18:02
then (after 60 seconds recovery time)
17:48
So, job done. Not exactly setting the tarmac on fire again yet but a solid 6 mile session in the bank.
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