it begins

My intention is to train very hard for a few weeks now, with the idea of being in good shape for November races. There is no reason to do any long runs (over 15miles), they will resume at Christmas. 10 miles is long enough for now, moving to 13 next weekend. but crucially the runs need to be completed at a hard pace.

So it began this weekend - as usual a hard lap of Gelt on Saturday morning was enjoyed with Plucky for company. Legs were jaded somewhat from Thursdays mega effort so the final 10mins were a bit of a struggle. Lap time of 31:22 is respectable.

Today I decided to do 10miles of intervals. I waited until 1pm so I'd had over 24hours recovery time from Gelt. This session is a bit like doing 2mile reps but with a continuous jog recovery between the efforts. I start with 4 minutes of easy pace running, then 11 minutes as hard as I can sustain. Then repeat three more times (all without stopping). The idea is that after 4x 4 and 11 (or 1 hour) I will have covered the whole 10mile course. But this isnt 2004 and I cant get near 60 minutes nowadays, meaning after the fourth 11 minute effort I have another few minutes to jog to the finish line. Todays time was 63mins 50secs which is OK I guess.

The trouble with this session when I am not super-fit is the percentage of the 10miles spent jogging (today 15:50 out of 63:50is approx 25%) which drops the average speed and skews the result a little. Next time I might consider doing 4x 4 and 12. This would result in finishing the course mid-fast-rep and give just 12mins jogging in 62-63mins total (under 20%). It shouldnt really matter what the pace is - its the heartrate that proves that hard work was done but I am a slave to the stopwatch. Although the HR was a wee bit low today (averaging 170ish on the 11min efforts) I couldnt have tried any harder, I felt quite poorly for a couple of hours after running.

I intend to do shorter reps (5x 5mins) on Tuesday, easy 6to8mile offroad run Wednesday, then tempo run Thursday (probably 10miles in 64/65 mins).

Although I enjoyed all the fellrunning I did this summer, I feel very comfortable training fast and hard on the roads. I will never do another 5k, 10k, 10m, half or full marathon PB unless I give up work to run twice a day, but as long as I enjoy what I am doing then I am doing the best thing for me. I reckon by late Nov' I will again be keen to enjoy some crisp, bright winter days on the fells with Iain and Stu. I dont know if I will even want to aim for a BGR next year - I get a great deal of enjoyment helping attempts and may just stick with that again next year.