Go Hard

Now into proper training . Time to make it work and get past a lot of the problems that have imposed on my running over the last couple of years. I'm implementing a tactic taken from one of my favourite articles on training for ultramarathons, Train Like A Mother - The (so-called) Guide To Effective Training.  This tactic comes under the heading of Trick The Mind. It is as simple as altering the day I mark as the start of my training week. For me I have never followed the traditional seven day week. Fifteen years of rotating shift work has kept me out of sync with the majority. Usually my roster is an 8 day rotation and I have always thought that my week starts on my first shift of that 8 day cycle. My usual roster is 4 shifts of 10-14 hours followed by 4 days off, though that first day off isn't really one as I finish my night shift at 7am and need to sleep for the day. Looking back that creates mental difficulties in that each week of training starts when I have my biggest...

Back from holidays and the reality of winter was my welcome back. It took a few days to shake the jet lag, longer than I expected. I thought years of shift work would have allowed me to flick back into gear quickly. Turns out it's quite different. So back into training. After hardly any running over the last few weeks and the added stiffness that 15 hours on a plane brings I needed to make sure my body was going to cope. That calls for a short lead in before I hit a full week of training. This was a simple three days of training. An hour run each day, and some moderate strength training on the first two. Plus plenty of stretching. There were no pace goals on these runs. Instead they went like this:  1. Easy, just relax and enjoy.  2. Easy again, but mix in a few strides to kick in the nervous system. They felt very sluggish.  3. A solid effort over a variety of hills. The runs did what I hoped and had me feeling better each day and seemed to eliminate the stiffness. It se...