Marathon training – week 9 of 14 – half measures


I ran 6 hours longer this week than I did the previous week. Unfortunately, I was meant to run ten hours longer than I did last week, so we’re not exactly perfect at this point.

Tuesday, my first run of the week, went better than expected. I’d been carrying a sore calf since an ill-advised weight session in San Francisco, and although on the latte two 15 minute repeats I was suffering, legs still heavy and sore from the travel, I managed to get through the session intact. The next day I went back to the track, and undid some of that.

I had changed my power meter to the latest version, a footpod rather than a chest strap, and that meant I needed to recalibrate as there were fairly large differences in the power readings. That meant going to the track to run as hard as I could for half an hour, which was slightly disheartening as I hadn’t improved in a month (the flip side of this is that I’m not worse, despite taking a week off training and not being fully recovered from the jet lag at this point). What was probably worse is that running as hard as you can at the track is not so great an idea when you have to get up and go running again the next day. Or rather, if you wanted to get up and go running the next day. I missed Thursday entirely.

Then on Friday, I still felt bad and only managed a five minute wobble around the block, which meant by Saturday I was further disheartened and the relaxation of spending four hours in the cinema was outweighed by my fear of not being good enough for the marathon. Which in turn wasn’t made better by not being able to manage the full 3×30 minute session I had planned, and bailing after doing 2 30 minute repeats and one 10 minute on. Like a downward spiral of worry and fear.

On Sunday, I had an even longer run to do: 2 hours and 45 minutes, and I was meant to tick that off first thing, but since I was exhausted from running for an hour and a half, I put it off and put it off until 4:30 in the afternoon. This is not a good time to go out running in Singapore, even if (perhaps especially) when you put on a Camelbak with a litre of water in it and choose the hilliest route you can find. So I only managed 24 kilometres, but I gained almost 700 metres of climbing. That’s a lot in somewhere as flat as Singapore.

Tomorrow, the training starts again. With 5 2 miles bursts. That’s going to hurt.

On the positive side, I didn’t spend any time sleeping on the floor of an airport the whole week, and I was back in the bosom of my family.hrweek9
Still, as the graph shows, I spent 32% of my time in zone 3, which isn’t too good – pushing harder than necessary this week. Maybe if I’d stuck more good quality, slow runs in there things would have evened up.

And so to bed. Short run tomorrow morning, long long run in the evening…


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