Set The Stage

Now past the festive season and hopefully the scattered training is behind me. I've marked the 27th December as my new start line. Works better for me than New Year's Day. Here's how the running has gone so far:

Day 1: only 17 days out from Two Bays.
10.2km easy averaging 5:37/km including warm up and cool down.

Day 2: Hill Sprints 12x ~9-10sec, walk/jog recovery of about 2min. The hill is about 13% incline. The aim is for maximum effort on each sprint, but I am clearly used to the endurance side of things. At the moment there is a clear ceiling on how much power and speed I can get out of my legs. Hopefully regular use of this style of training will improve neuromuscular recruitment.

Day 3: Long 2 hour. The aim was to contain the run to within 2 hours including warm up, main set and cool down. I headed out easy and waited until my legs felt right to kick it up to pace. That was 2.8km. Then I wanted to hold between 4:40-4:17/km by running mainly on feel. I got 18.3km averaging 4:28/km before my body acknowledged it had burned through its glycogen stores earlier than I hoped giving me some extra distance of cool down. A total of 24.8km in 2:02.

Day 4: Easy 12.3km @ 6:40/km. Felt very flat, but comfortable at the slow speed.

Day 5: Easy 10.2km @ 6:33/km. I could have forced the pace up, but made sure I didn't.

Day 6: Moderate 11.7km gradually, but steadily building from up from a stupidly easy pace to quite a solid effort. The course was reasonably hilly which of course influenced the speed. Importantly the heart rate profile between wu and cd was as close as you'll ever see to a straight line from 117 to 162bpm.

Day 7: Hill Springing. 6x ~30sec hill springs with jog/walk down rec of about 90sec + 4x80m flat sprints. With wu & cd total 8km.


Day 8: Long. Originally hoping to be out for 2.5 hours holding between 5:04-5:27/km. This didn't happen. I didn't feel right when getting out of bed. Maybe I had a mild fever, or last night's hill springing took more out of me than I gave it credit. After the first half hour, I just struggled and got slower and slower despite initially trying to keep the speed reasonable. Eventually it became clear the run wasn't going to work. I took a shortcut home and let myself fall into a near shuffle. 19.8km in a little under 2 hours.

Day 9: easy 9.5km @ 6:11/km.

All up a fair new start.

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