Marathon training – week 6 of 14 (too much too young)


I ended last week by slacking off and not doing my long Sunday run. That left me unexpectedly fresh on Monday, so when I went to the track I ran (in epically wet conditions) a surprisingly consistent set of 400m repeats.consistency

Pretty much every lap was under 1:25, and they were almost all within a second of each other.  So I was pleased with that (and pleased that I’d put in the fastest average in two and a half years, and the most consistent set since I’ve been running at the track). When I reviewed the power data in detail, it was also nice to see that every interval was pretty much the same as every other interval – so I wasn’t compromising my form on the later repeats as I got more tired… So that was all great.

It didn’t turn out to be so great for the rest of the week – running that hard wasn’t something I was really ready for, and I paid for it on each successive day.

Or rather, I got home psyched up on Monday night, then didn’t sleep. Then didn’t sleep properly on Tuesday night either, and had about three hours sleep in total, and that meant on Wednesday I failed to get out in the morning, tried to do a hard set of long intervals in the evening, and had to pack it in 60% of the way through. I don’t like failing like that, especially when I was too tired to drag myself out for any running at all on Thursday, and only just rescued this with a fairly solid run on the Saturday, and then this behemoth on Sunday morning:
 
sundayrun
This was 16 and a half 10 minute repeats: 9 minutes running at reasonable pace, then slacking off for a minute, then doing it again. That’s the longest (distance and time) I’ve done since I started this training plan, and I was worried that I wasn’t going to last beyond an hour. (At the hour mark I’d got to the Evans Road track where I started the week, and had my lips locked to the water fountain for a solid thirty seconds.) Still, I made it all the way through and the psychological benefit of actually completing a workout kept me in good stead for the rest of the day. Even when I had to go out for another run in the evening.

this_was_the_week
So, lots of red and yellow. I’d hope that this week would be better, but I have to fit my training around a trans-Pacific flight. So perhaps not…

Reviewing power and heart rate over the last week, things don’t look very polarised. Not sure if that’s an issue or not.
hr_this_week
this_week_power
And so to bed. 5 hard miles tomorrow, and packing. And hopefully the kids don’t go wild tonight…


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