Last week, I discussed wanting to increase my mileage up to 40-50 km per week by the end of January. Typically then, this week I developed a cold. But, such is winter with two young children!
The week was disrupted somewhat as I was working away from home Tuesday – Wednesday – Thursday, but as I’ve done before, I managed to work my way around it, and arranged to join the City of Salisbury Athletics and Running Club for their Wednesday night club run.
Wednesday: 10 km with CoSARC
In fact, that Wednesday night run ended up being my first of the week. I’d intended to run on the Tuesday night, when I arrived at my Salisbury hotel, but I ended up getting in so late that I basically just ate and went to bed.
I arrived at the Five Rivers Leisure Centre with plenty of time to spare, and was impressed with the organisation – everyone had to sign in, and note down which group they were running with. There was a box to later tick to say you’d returned. This wasn’t something I’d come across before, but definitely seems like a very good idea.
I’d looked up beforehand, and decided to run with their group 6, doing roughly 6.5 miles (just over 10 km) at 9 min/mile. The joy of running with a group in a strange place is being able to simply run, rather than spend the entire time checking where you are, where you have to turn next, and generally just getting a bit stressed. Of course, it was somewhat typical that the first thing we did was run straight from the leisure centre to my hotel; one bit of road that I did know!
It was a nice run – I really don’t know the area well enough to be able to comment much on where we went, but I did notice when we ran through the park that hosts Salisbury parkrun, which we did way back in 2016. I ran mostly alone for the first half of our run, just listening to various conversations, before having a good natter for the second half of the run. Our pace was a smidgen faster than advertised, averaging 5:30 per kilometre (8:50 per mile) for 10.6 km.
Thank you very much to all involved with CoSARC for letting me run with you.
Thursday: General aerobic
When I got back on Thursday, I was more or less straight back out of the door for this run. It was a bit chilly, but I needed the miles. Nothing exciting, just a 7 km run around Taunton at a relatively steady pace; 5:30 per kilometre average again, with no single kilometre faster than 5:21 or slower than 5:40.
Saturday: Thornbury parkrun
I wrote a full report in another blog post, so as usual, I’ll just discuss my actual run. This was a tough course with a buggy. I took it relatively easy for the first lap, but was constantly easing my way through the field, having started at the back. There were obviously points where I was able to make better progress (downhill, on tarmac) and places where I made less (uphill, on grass, narrow bits). and so the pace bounced up and down a little bit throughout the run. I pretty much ran negative splits throughout though; especially if you consider the grade-adjusted pace: 5:35, 5:24, 5:06, 5:01, 4:56. A time of 26:25 with the buggy is nothing to be scoffed at; it’s quicker than I did Weymouth, Barnstaple, Plymvalley, Shepton Mallet or Exeter Riverside. And obviously quicker than Mount Edgcumbe!
Weekly summary
My cold, which started to come through on Friday evening, nearly stopped us going to Thornbury parkrun: I’m bad enough in the mornings, and waking up with the start of a cold didn’t help. But I made the decision that if I was going to get a cold, I might as well run while i could, as it wasn’t going to make things much worse. I’m glad we did, especially as I then wasn’t able to run on Sunday due to being too thick with cold, and just plain wiped out. So for the week overall, I did 22.7 km, which was well under the 38.8 that I’d hit last week. Still, it was three decent runs, and I’m now up to five weeks of more regular running. Hopefully I can shake off the worst of this cold over the next couple of days, and get some more mileage in this week, but in all honesty, I’m not going to force things.