The second week of my training involved making a few changes to fit in the fourth race of the Yeovilton 5k series. I had contemplated dropping the race to allow me to focus on my half marathon training, but achieving a sub-20 5k has been a target for a long time, and I knew that this month I had a good chance of doing it. With that in mind, I made the adjustments below:
Book plan:
Monday: Rest
Tuesday: 7 miles General Aerobic + hill reps + strides
Wednesday: 8 miles Endurance
Thursday: Rest
Friday: 8 miles Lactate Threshold
Saturday: Rest
Sunday: 11 miles Endurance
My plan:
Monday: Rest
Tuesday: 7 miles General Aerobic + hill reps + strides
Wednesday: 4 miles (Yeovilton 5k race + warm-up)
Thursday: Rest
Friday: 8 miles General Aerobic
Saturday: 4 miles (parkrun + warm-up)
Sunday: 11 miles Endurance
Monday:
Rest day.
Tuesday:
This session was a similar format to last week’s Tuesday run, but slightly further, and with the addition of hill repeats. After my watch crashing during this run last week, I chose not to use the workout I’d programmed, and rather just to manage the run myself. This worked out better than I was expecting to be honest! Again, the morning miles were tough to start with, but I soon settled into the run. The hill that I chose to use for my repeats turned out not to actually be as steep as I’d remembered, which was slightly annoying, but overall I found this session worked pretty well – it seems a good way of including a small amount of speed work in the week, without going crazy.
Wednesday:
Wooo!
Rather than the eight mile endurance run that the book suggested, I was running the Yeovilton 5k in the evening. Pretty much everything was ideal for the race: I was running well in training, the weather wasn’t too hot, and my day at work hadn’t been too tiring. My nutrition through the day probably wasn’t perfect, but hey, can’t have everything! Last month, I’d ran a perfectly paced first 3k by following a young lady from Tiverton Harriers, but then dropped off the pace over the last couple. Seeing her at the start again this month, I decided to see try to follow her again.
This was a mistake. Unlike last month, when she ran pretty much exactly 20-minute pace for the entire race, she hared off this time. Of course, my tactic meant that I did the same, and completed the first kilometre in 3:45 – well inside the 4:00 needed for my target. After this point, I realised that I should manage my own pace, rather than base my running on someone else, that frankly, I knew nothing about. Long story short, I held a 4 minute kilometre pace for the next couple of kilometres, and although I dropped off a bit towards the end, I finished in 19:50, smashing both my previous 5k time of 20:15 and my target!
Thursday:
Legs felt completely broken after the race the night before. I really need to consider cool down runs after hard races. Thankfully, it was a rest day.
Friday:
The book had a lactate threshold run in on this day, but after a 5k race on Wednesday, and with a parkrun planned on Saturday, I made the decision to change this to an ‘easy’ General Aerobic run. I toyed around with whether to run in the morning or evening, but as I was leaving home early to drive down to Cornwall for work, I decided to run it in the evening. Unfortunately, I had some… bowel issues that afternoon, and all I will say here is thank you to the staff at the Sports Centre 2 miles into my run, who let me use their toilets! Otherwise, this was a pretty nondescript training run: the pace was pretty comfortable, averaging around 8:45.
Saturday:
My birthday! I’d originally hoped to go down and
Considering that I was ‘taking this easy’, I seem to look pretty rough! (in red)
do some parkrun tourism at Parke parkrun, but both Lolly and I were exhausted from the week, and so in the end we just stayed in Taunton, and I headed over for a pretty easy effort at Longrun Meadow, getting around in just over 23 minutes, with a pretty significant negative split.
Sunday:
After a hard 5k on Wednesday, eight miles on Friday, and another four on Saturday, I wasn’t really feeling up for this run at all. In fact, the title of the run on Strava sums it up: “The ‘maybe 23 miles in three days was a bad idea’ run”.
Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that bad. I maintained a quicker pace than my Friday run, and even incorporated Rumwell hill in towards the end. Mentally, this was a really tough run; it wasn’t until I was around eight miles in that I stopped worrying about how much further I had to run. But physically, it wasn’t actually as bad as it seemed like it was going to be.
Summary:
Overall the inclusion of the race definitely impacted heavily on my training this week: I wasn’t able to include a threshold run, and splitting the Wednesday mileage across 5k events on Wednesday and Saturday was both physically demanding, and skewed the mileage to the end of the week. I’m still planning to race the Yeovilton 5k in both August and September, as well as the Haselbury Trail on the first Wednesday of August, so this is something I’m going to have to bear in mind for each of those. I’m used to running more frequently, but less far than this plan, so the planned runs all being seven miles or more is taking a little bit of getting used to, but I’m hoping that it will have result in a significant improvement in my endurance running, especially the mental aspect, which I struggled with this week.