Unsurprisingly, after picking up a cold last week, this was another slightly curtailed week. I didn’t manage to get out at all until Thursday, and I wasn’t sure what I would manage. Obviously, with this sort of week, any grand targets get thrown out of the window, and it’s just about doing what I can, and what feels like it isn’t stupid and likely to plunge me back into the depths of illness.

Oh, and you might notice that I’ve flipped back into miles. My attempts to convert to kilometres lasted two weeks, before I realised that I was having to reverse engineer everything into miles to figure out if it was the right pace / distance etc. It wasn’t worth it. I will still use kilometre distances and paces sometimes for 5k and 10k races and training, but by-and-large, I’m back to good old imperial.

Thursday: General aerobic

‘General aerobic’ is mostly just a posh way of saying ‘just a run’. It’s a pace generally between ‘steady-state’ running and ‘recovery’, but overlapping with each. Some people call these sort of runs ‘trash’ miles, but they do serve a specific purpose, particularly for me at the moment. They do not (normally) have a specific running benefit, but they do help to improve and maintain fitness. For me at the moment, building up my mileage and fitness, this is the main sort of run that I need to be doing. Tempo and speed work will come later, as will the long runs. I don’t need to be doing recovery runs as I’m not pushing myself hard enough to need that recovery time. Now, I just need to be out and running.

The run itself? A 2.7-mile effort around Taunton. I kept a pretty even pace, slowing slightly after my first mile to come in at 9:00 min/mile, which is relatively similar to most of my road running lately. While it’s fine for what I’m doing at the moment, I need to make sure that I ratchet things up once I’m up to distance and training properly: it would be so easy to settle into this pace.

Saturday: General aerobic (eventually)

Saturday was a weird day. We chose not to do any parkrun tourism so that we could focus on a few house chores. Lolly did manage to run a decent time at Burnham & Highbridge parkrun in the morning though. I was actually pretty motivated to get out and run a recce of my leg of the Minehead to Bishops Lydeard relay. In the last few weeks I’ve been out with the club doing some of the other legs, but I hadn’t actually run any of my own. But anyway, despite feeling pretty motivated to do it, I didn’t, and it started to get dark.

Thankfully, I did manage to get out (and not completely waste the day) for some miles around Taunton. I do struggle with these runs around town. When they are just ‘steady’, ‘general aerobic’ or ‘recovery’ runs, I find it hard to motivate myself. For a while now I’ve tried to run in new places to keep myself interested. That’s becoming increasingly hard around Taunton itself, but I incorporated a road that I’ve long meant to run on during this run; Hyde Lane, which goes past the rugby club. It was nothing particularly exciting, but it’s just nice to go somewhere different. If only for a mile!

Overall, this run ended up being six miles at an 8:48 min/mile pace.

Sunday: M2BL Leg One Recce

A day late (and a dollar short?) I managed to get myself out to try part of my relay route. As I was doing it on my own, I had to run it out-and-back, so didn’t fancy trying the whole 8.5-mile route for a 17-mile round trip! I drove up to Blue Anchor, where I parked on the seafront, before following my trusty OS Map App. I’d previously plotted my leg as a route, and downloaded the maps onto my phone so that they would work even if I had no phone signal. Thusly armed, I headed off into the unknown.

I was only half a mile into the run when I came across a pair of runners looking at their (paper) OS Map, along with their son on a bicycle. It turned out that they (the Shortens) were also running the route, and were trying to work out how to get through the farm. I (semi-)confidently led the way through, guided by my app. They suggested that I could run on, but I was in no hurry (sorry Lolly), so opted to stick with them for some company.

Through the farm, across the field, and we joined ‘Black Monkey Lane’. Which turned into a river. Okay, not so bad as the one that we had in leg three, but still – wet feet. Thanks Nigel! (Okay, it’s fun, I admit.) A bit of road, then some more fields to navigate, and then a long drag up the tricky Forche’s Lane to the changeover point. At this point the Shortens jumped into their car to head off, while I had the 3.9 miles to repeat in reverse.

More confident of the route (and running predominantly downhill) I was able to get along a bit quicker on the way back. This was a nice varied trail route, and one that I’d never have done if not for the relay. I want to try the route a couple more times before the day, and at least once do the whole lot in one go, but for a first run out, this was pretty good I think.

Weekly summary

Given that I didn’t manage to get out at all until Thursday, getting 16 miles in was a decent achievement. It was a relief to finally recce my section of the relay. Hopefully, with my cold out of the way, I can build my mileage back over 25 miles next week. Beyond that, there’s little to comment on!