Week in Review: 21 - 27 Nov '16

The week before last I determined that I'd spent more than enough time sitting on my bum recovering from my previous bout of training which culminated in the Chelmsford marathon so last week I knuckled down and put in some good training.

Took things easy most of the week with the aim of getting my mileage backup, with the exception of Tuesday, on which I introduced hill intervals.

Bruce Fordyce swears by Sweethoogte for Comrades success, and whilst I've run Sweethoogte (nearly 20yrs ago), it's damn hard to find something equivalent within a 5k run of home. The closest I could find was a relatively steep hill of approximately 370m with about 24m of elevation gain so that will become my Sweethoogte for my Comrades success.

I had no idea how I'd do with these but stuck to my intension: ~5k easy warmup by feel (I'll do this by MAF in future), as many reps as possible until I notice a degradation in form, and then an easy cool down.

Going into these I thought I'd manage five reps but in the end only hit three reps before my legs were jelly and nowhere near coherent on form. Looking back on the times, I def ran the first one way too quick: 1:13, 1:21, 1:22.

With time I hope to run these all with a pretty consistent time and get up to about 8 before my form goes to pot.

I'd get the chance to get out for a run on Wednesday as I had a meeting in the morning and agreed to head into London to the co-working space we use there. As it was my first time there, I didn't know what facilities were available so used the trip as a reccy. Result: there is a shower and somewhere for me to lock my bag whilst I'm out on my run.

This week I also brought back the Sunday morning long run and will try and keep these up. In the past I've tended to drop these until the new year as I shied away from the cold, but not this year. I know these are going to be tough and "character building" as winter sets in good and proper but the final payout will be worth it. Sunday's run was a pretty good run until about 50mins in when I started to feel a bit of gastro distress. Thankfully it wasn't debilitating and came and went as I ran. It did however mean I had to slow down at times. Note to self: make sure you go before you go 😉.

So all in all, a good solid week of solid training.