Bristol Half Marathon Training: Week 7

by Ben

Now that I’ve got into the second half of my training plan, I’ve been contemplating why I signed up for Bristol specifically. Over the past couple of years, I’ve run mostly small, local races – either Glastonbury, Taunton or the Battle of Sedgemoor 10k have been the biggest, and none of them can have much more than 500 runners, if that. So what am I thinking, entering a race with over 10,000 entrants?!

Well, part of it is exactly that. I want to experience the ‘big race’ atmosphere again, for the first time since my first half marathon at Silverstone in spring 2014. I want to be able to use the hoards of other runners, and the crowds, to drag me along. The last few miles of the Burnham half last year were lonely – that certainly won’t be the case in Bristol. I also have some unfinished business with the Bristol half: my brother and I signed up for the race as far back as 2010, but I suffered badly from shin splints and didn’t do enough training, so registered a DNS (did not start). In 2012, after running the Bristol 10k, I decided that I’d do the half marathon as well. But I got injured again, and didn’t end up doing it. So it would get the monkey off my back, as they say.

I want a medal that looks a bit like this. But different. Hopefully it won’t say Birmingham. Or 10k.

Also, I’d like a shiny ‘Great Run’ medal.

Book plan:
Monday: Rest day
Tuesday: 9 miles lactate threshold
Wednesday: 10 miles endurance
Thursday: Rest day
Friday: 8 miles general aerobic + speed
Saturday: 5 miles recovery
Sunday: 13 miles progression

My plan:
Just the same.

Monday:
Rest day.

Tuesday:
One of my only concerns with this training cycle is how many lactate threshold sessions I have skipped due to races. (I might have mentioned this once or twice…) This is the last one scheduled, as the training starts to wind down towards the race a bit after this week, at least with regards to tough sessions such as this one. The run was pretty simple: head out for a warm-up, then 38 minutes at lactate threshold (or tempo) pace, and then a cool down. As in the past, I opted to run this along the canal, with the flat path giving me the best chance of good pacing. I figured that I wanted to run my tempo section at about 7 min/miles, which meant that I would cover around 5.5 miles during it, with the other 3.5 miles either side.

Mentally, I found it easier to split the run into four parts: the warm-up (about 1.8 miles of easy running), then the ‘outward’ 19 minutes of my tempo run, the ‘return’ 19 minutes, and the cool down. Although I was aiming for 7 min/mile for the tempo section, I had expected to slip to somewhere between 7:05 and 7:10. Instead, I was pretty bang on my target, and if anything, was slightly quicker. Reminding myself as I approached the 19 minute ‘turnaround’ point that I wasn’t actually having a break was a bit tough, and the next bit was the toughest, and slowest, bit of the tempo section, but I still held my pace pretty consistent. I was very happy to nail this run – though it was a slightly sobering thought that a 90 minute half marathon would involve running a quicker pace for more than twice as long!

Wednesday:
For my midweek ‘medium long’ run, I opted to run with my club. The route was around 7.5 miles, so I just had to add a little bit on either side to make up the distance. As usual, it was nice to run with the group, both for the social aspect, and to mix things up in terms of routes – this week’s was certainly not one I would have ever run on my own! (I’d have got very, very lost.) It was also good to chat to someone else (Emma) doing Bristol, about our individual targets, and getting a bit of course knowledge from her.

It’s starting to get quite steep… (credit: Veloviewer)

Thursday:
Rest day (and gosh, was I happy about that!)

Friday:
This was planned as a 8 mile general aerobic run, with ten 100 metre sprints towards the end. Fatigue was really starting to set in by this stage of my training though; my distance curve was starting to look like an exponential graph on Veloviewer, and I was feeling the effects of such a steep increase. With that in mind, I cut the sprints from the run, and just headed out for a gentle 8 mile run along the extended river and canal route that I’d done the previous week. On very tired legs, 8:40 min/mile felt tough enough, and I was starting to look ahead to my Sunday 13 mile progression run with dread.

Disclaimer: I didn’t actually run with Lolly. (credit: Emma Rigby)

Saturday:
We had made plans to visit some friends who live near Exeter, and so it seemed an excellent opportunity to finally visit Exeter Riverside parkrun. At around 45 minutes away, this has been one of the closest parkruns to us ever since it started. Which I was amazed to notice was over two years ago! A write-up of our experience will be detailed in another blog, but in terms of my training, let’s say it’s hard to do a recovery run at parkrun! Even running with the buggy, I kept straying quicker than intended. Still, overall I ran 5 miles at about 9:15 min/mile, which I guess counts as recovery. (Let’s ignore mile three, at 8:36…)

Sunday:
Perhaps because my recovery run included some miles that were a bit too fast, or perhaps because of my tough threshold run earlier in the week, or perhaps because in the past four weeks I’d run over 150 miles, I could not face my planned 13 miles progression run. Instead, I opted to run a normal 13 mile run, and if I was feeling up to it, I would run the last two or three miles a bit quicker to make it a ‘fast finish’ run.

In the end, this was actually a pretty hard effort run. After spending the first few miles warming up into the run, I ran a pretty steady pace of around 8:00 min/mile for the middle miles, and then pushed on towards the end, dipping down to between 7:30 and 7:00 min/mile. This was the first time that I’d run half marathon distance (or further) outside of a race, and a time of 1:46:07 is one that I’m pretty happy with for a training run!

Summary:
The week started well, but towards the end I think the efforts of the past few weeks began to have an impact. Next week is a lighter week – less mileage and easier workouts, so hopefully I can use that to recover, and then there’s only one more heavy week before the mileage starts to taper back. I’m still feeling pretty happy with my progress, but I need to start focusing a bit more on continual recovery – by adding stretching and foam-roller sessions most days. Hopefully that can help to keep my body together and strong as I close in on race day. (Only just over a month to go now!)

Bristol Half Marathon Training: Week 6

by Ben

Halfway there! The end of this week of training marked the halfway point of the plan, and of course means that there are only six weeks left until my half marathon, and only four of those are proper training weeks, with the last two being taper weeks. So, at halfway, I think it’s time to take a look at my progress, and what my target time should be, though I’ll refine it more as time goes on.

At the start of this training cycle, I said that “In my heart I’m still aiming for sub-90, but in reality, I think that has become something of a pipe-dream now.” That was taking into consideration my lack of winter/spring training, my previous HM time (96:37, last autumn), and how my pace was at the time (43:20 10k, in May). How about now? Well, after chatting to one of the coaches at our club, he reckons that the 19:50 I ran at Yeovilton last month sets me up well for a sub-90 half. So at the moment, my Gold target remains 89:59. My Silver target is 91:32, which is equivalent to a pace of 6:59 min/mile – getting under 7:00 minute pace would be a massive step mentally. The Bronze target is 93:59 – still a PB by over two and a half minutes, and a pace of around 7:10. I was contemplating leaving the Bronze target as anything under my current time, but to be honest, I’d be pretty disappointed not to run sub-94, even though it would be a PB.

Book plan:
Monday: Rest day
Tuesday: 8 miles general aerobic + speed
Wednesday: 9 miles endurance
Thursday: Rest day
Friday: 9 miles VO2 max
Saturday: 5 miles recovery
Sunday: 12 miles endurance

My plan:
Monday: Rest day
Tuesday: 8 miles general aerobic
Wednesday: 5 miles general aerobic AM / Yeovilton 5k race + warm-up PM
Thursday: Rest day
Friday: 9 miles VO2 max
Saturday: 5 miles recovery
Sunday: 13 miles endurance

Monday:
Rest day.

Tuesday:
With another midweek race, this week was due to be another disrupted training period. Thankfully, the scheduled Tuesday session wasn’t to be another dropped lactate threshold run, but I did still make a small change, dropping the speed element from the planned general aerobic run. The usual inability to wake up also meant that this was in the evening. The route was a relatively simple one, a slight extension of my normal river and canal loop, with a bit of exploring along some quite overgrown paths at the far end! With a race the next day, I kept my pace and heart-rate pretty gentle.

Wednesday:
I had initially planned to run five miles in the morning and then Yeovilton in the evening, which would take me up to the required mileage without having to add miles later in the week. However, my failure to wake up on Tuesday meant a Tuesday evening run, which meant that my desire to run on Wednesday morning was extremely low. Coupled with the prospect of a hard race in the evening, I decided to drop the morning run, and possibly just add a cool down run in the evening for some extra mileage.

It was like my own Olympics on Strava!

My aim for the Yeovilton 5k was pretty simple – with tired legs midway through a hard section of training, I would be happy with another sub-20, and happy with any sort of PB. With that in mind, I aimed to head out at 3:50 min/km pace, and see how things developed. (Incidentally, while I train in min/mile, I tend to race in min/km. I know, it’s strange, but it helps me to minimise some of my mental demons. If you told me I was running around 6:15 min/mile, I’d tell you that it was too fast, and I couldn’t do it. If you told me 3:50 min/km, I shrug and say I’d see what I could do.) The first couple of kilometres felt terrible: my calves were sore and tired, and I thought there was a very real chance I’d just have to stop and walk after about 3 kilometres. Of course, that didn’t happen, and with watch splits of 3:49, 3:50, 3:57, 4:00 and 3:57, for an official time of 19:32, I beat last month’s time by 18 seconds to set a new PB. It seems that my training is paying off, for shorter distances at least.

After a drink and a quick natter, I set off on another lap of the course. As well as making up some of my lost mileage, my hope was that a cool down run would also help my legs recover for the runs later that week. The warm-up, race and cool down came to 6.8 miles, meaning that I was only about two miles short on the book’s plan.

Thursday:
Rest day – and a sorely needed one too!

Friday:
I approached Friday with a combination of excitement and trepidation. It was the first V̇O2 max session of the plan – Pfitzinger and Latter’s title for short distance speed intervals. In this case, 6 repeats of 1,000 metres. I love intervals: running fast is my favourite sort of running, and typically these intervals are quicker than I would even race a 5k, so it’s a rare excuse to really push myself. However, in this case, coming just two days after an actual 5k race, I was a bit worried about how I would cope. The plan gave me some guidelines – the intervals were to be part of a 9 mile run overall, and each one should be run between 3k and 5k pace, with a recovery period of roughly 50-90% of the time for each repeat. Got that? I decided that with the race before, I would err on the cautious side, and aimed to complete each repeat in 3:50. For the recovery period, I went for around 80% of the repeat time, 3:05, including a 400 metre jog. With a jog to the track, and back, that would take me up to the required distance.

Right, so all planned. Great.

Oh, I still had to run it. Actually, it went quite well. It was pretty damn tough, and my reps weren’t quite as consistent as I wanted, but I remembered why I enjoy track work. The feeling of being able to push yourself right to the limit, knowing that you can have a break, a drink, and then do it again.

Saturday:
I had a 5 mile recovery run planned on Saturday. I had initially contemplated doing this as a jog to parkrun, a slow jog around, and then a jog home. But, although I was awake in plenty of time, my legs hadn’t really woken up from the workout the day before, and so instead I just walked over and supported Lolly running instead. I ended up not getting out until just after 4 in the afternoon, and ran a slightly erratically paced five miles at an average of 9:20 min/mile. I’d probably have benefited from being even slower, but it’s so tough to manage!

Sunday:
Although I wasn’t too bothered about trying to catch up on the missed mileage, I opted to add a mile to my Sunday long run. After my last couple of half marathons, in which I’ve faded badly at the end, I want to get as many runs in at half marathon distance or above in preparation for this one. Next week is also scheduled for a 13 mile progression run, and I thought it would be nice to do a ‘standard’ 13 mile long run before a harder effort one!

As I’d run a fair number of harder effort runs through the week, I opted to head out with my club’s Sunday ‘All-Stars’ for the run, which for me would be a gentler pace, but also so much needed company on the long run. It was also nice not to have to worry about the route – although some of the paths were a bit… overgrown. Towards the end of the run I peeled off the group to add a little bit of distance (and elevation) onto the route by heading over Cotlake Hill. I really enjoyed having some company, and running a route that I would never have planned myself.

Summary:

How I felt at the end of a hard week!

How to summarise the week? I set a new 5k PB, ran a tough track session but hit my times on every repeat, and had my longest run of the plan, falling just short of half marathon distance itself. A great week, I’d say! I’m feeling much more confident for Bristol – seeing the positive effect of my training on my Yeovilton times, which have been 20:21 (June), 19:50 (July) and 19:32 (August), has shown me that all the work work is paying off. Some other signs of this have been apparent – after some of my 8/9 mile runs, I’ve been bounding up and down the stairs for my shower still. (This certainly wasn’t the case after my 13 mile run though!) The only slight obstacle to my training at the moment is the hugely successful Team GB, who are enticing me to stay up late watching their successes, rather than getting the sleep I need to help myself recover between sessions. But it’s worth it…

Bristol Half Marathon Training: Week 5

by Ben

Despite coming off a recovery week, I entered this week still pretty tired – though it was less physical tiredness, and more mental fatigue. That wasn’t helped by the fact that I was expecting the next couple of weeks to be pretty tough – not only was it the speed-focused meso-cycle, but I also had races two Wednesdays in a row. Each race has two downsides – the hard effort is more tiring than my training runs, and it also means deviating from the plan, and having to rework things slightly.

Book plan:
Monday: Rest day
Tuesday: 8 miles lactate threshold
Wednesday: 9 miles endurance
Thursday: Rest day
Friday: 7 miles GA + sprint
Saturday: 4 miles recovery
Sunday: 12 miles progression

My plan:
Monday: Rest day
Tuesday: 9 miles endurance
Wednesday: Haselbury Trail 10k race + warm-up
Thursday: Rest day
Friday: 7 miles GA + sprint
Saturday: 4 miles recovery
Sunday: 12 miles progression

Monday:
Rest day.

Tuesday:
While I’m getting a bit worried about the number of lactate threshold sessions that I’m binning off, the simple fact is that I can’t run such a hard session just before or after a race, and so like before I swapped the lactate threshold run out of my plan and replaced it with Wednesday’s endurance run. On Monday morning I was feeling pretty down about running, and contemplated either splitting this run between the morning and evening, or running the whole thing in the evening. I’d got fed up of planning routes, of being out for over an hour, and being tired all the time. But Lolly came to my rescue, and planned me a simple route before we went to bed; basically the Taunton 10k route, plus the run there and back.

The Taunton 10k route is one of my favourites – not necessarily because of the race – it’s just a nice gently undulating route which gets out of Taunton along some quiet lanes. It’s also a route that doesn’t require me to pay much attention, as you can’t really go wrong. Except… I did. Still, it only served to add about half a mile on, so no big problem! I was pleased with my pace on this run, and given how I’d felt the previous evening, it significantly exceeded my expectations.

Wednesday:

It’s fair to say that I went a bit OTT with my sprint finish… (credit: Dave and Tracy Symes)

The Haselbury Trail 10k. A full race report will follow, but this was inserted into my training plan in order to try to tick off 10 events in the Somerset Series, so that I ‘qualify’ for that series. In many ways, it’s largely irrelevant, as I’ll be lucky to even make the top ten, but it was one of my hopes coming into this year, so I’m going to do what I can to make it happen. Most of the race is reasonably gentle, across fields, but there’s a sharp hill at the end of both laps, and my legs were far too tired to do anything more than plod up it. Overall, I was a few seconds up on my time from last year, which I was a bit disappointed with. In retrospect, I’ve realised that this is far from an ideal part of my training plan to have a race, so hopefully the lack of improvement is more due to that, rather than any actual stagnation. All my other times, both in the Yeovilton 5k races, and on my training runs, point to improvements.

Thursday:
Rest day.

Friday:
Although I had contemplated switching the lactate threshold run to Friday, I was far too tired after my race to do that. As a result, I headed off on some ‘exploring’, extending my Strava heatmap by running along the new stretch of the A38, Taunton’s ‘Eastern Relief Road’. It wasn’t the most exciting place to run, but it’s always nice to run in a new place. The run itself was pretty good, though I unsurprisingly found the ten 100 metre sprints at the end of the run tough! The sprints themselves were relatively consistent: 21, 18, 19, 19, 19, 20, 19, 19, 19, 18, and I mostly managed to keep my recovery jogs consistent at around 40 seconds as well, so I’m pretty happy with that. Despite how hard they felt, I’m enjoying having sprints at the end of another run, as it’s a nice way to incorporate some speed work into the week without having to dedicate a whole session to it.

Saturday:
As the mileage has built up, the plan has added ‘recovery’ miles. The aim of the these runs is to feel better at the end than the start. I’m not totally sure that happened, but it was nice to go out for a shorter run for a change. Four miles made a nice change from the eight milers that I’ve got used to! In order to both keep my pace down, and to divert myself, I spent most of the run playing Pokemon Go, which served both purposes well, although I’m not sure it was the safest combination!

Sunday:
Progression run, round two. Without a doubt, I feared this run even more than I had the first time around. Then, it had come at the end of a meso-cycle, so I knew that I would have a recovery week after it. This time, it came mid-cycle, so I would have to run the following week on tired legs. Not to mention that after my race, I was starting the run on tired legs too! I planned myself another route that explored a new area, linking together the south of Taunton (Trull and Poundisford) with the east of Taunton (Stoke St Mary). Although I ran both areas regularly, I’d never navigated a route between the two.

progw5

Bizarrely, given the format of this run, it mostly got better as I went along. For the first few miles, I struggled to get going at all, and my pace reflected this somewhat, not dropping below 9 minute miles. As I got into the second quarter of the run, something changed, and I started enjoying the run a bit more, and at the same time found the pace easier to manage. That and the third quarter (which was mostly the new section) were both pretty enjoyable, before the run got pretty tough in the final quarter. My pace in each section increased as follows: 8:48, 8:02, 7:48, 7:15. Partly, I find that pretty demoralising: I found the 7:15 section really really tough, but it was only 2.5 miles at the end of a 12.5 mile run. In contrast, my half marathon PB at the moment is a pace of 7:21 for 13.1 miles. On the other hand, I know that I’m still in the middle of my training plan at the moment, and I had tapered and prepared for that race. And it’s always easier to run fast in a race than on a training run.

Summary:
Having a race in the middle of week does make things awkward, and it probably does devalue the training around it slightly too. However, I was glad that I managed to pretty much nail my progression run, even if it felt pretty tough. But, you know, it’s a 12 mile progression run – it’s meant to feel tough! Next week has another race, the fifth of the Yeovilton 5k series, so I go off-plan again, but after that things mostly settle down, I think…

Bristol Half Marathon Training: Week 4

by Ben

The end of week three involved some pretty tough sessions (a lactate threshold run on the Friday and a 12 mile progression run on the Sunday), and I came into the week glad of the chance at some recovery.

Book plan:
Monday: Rest
Tuesday: 8 miles General Aerobic + strides
Wednesday: 7 miles General Aerobic
Thursday: Rest
Friday: 8 miles General Aerobic
Saturday: Rest
Sunday: 9 miles General Aerobic

My plan:
For the second week running, no deviations!

Monday:
Rest day.

Tuesday:
I had an eight mile run scheduled, but life just got in the way, and this became the first run of the training plan that I abandoned completely. If I’m honest, this wasn’t just about other stuff – the amount of running I’ve been doing on this plan far surpasses anything I’ve been doing before, and I’ve been bordering on overtraining. Put that together with work and a toddler that doesn’t want to sleep, and I felt pretty low at the start of this week. I’ve been here before; the first few weeks of a training plan are always hard, and this one even more so. Hopefully, an easier week, and better management of some of the other issues, will help for the rest of the training plan.

Training this week might have gone better if I’d got out of bed earlier!

Wednesday:
After skipping my run the day before, I then found myself too tired to bring myself to run before work on the Wednesday – not a good place to be! Thankfully, I was able to use my running club to get myself out of the funk. A 7 and a half mile run, sandwiched between half mile runs there and back helped to claw back a little of the lost mileage, and running with other people is always so much easier. I intentionally dropped down a group for the easier pace during my recovery week, and it was good to catch up with some people I hadn’t seen in a while.

Thursday:
Rest day.

Friday:
Again, I didn’t manage to get up and do this run before work, so I had to squeeze it in after. This was a pretty ‘nothing’ run; my pace wandered around a bit, but it was never too hard. I made things a bit more entertaining for myself towards the end, by challenging myself not to cross over my ‘outward’ route. It’s the little things that keep me going sometimes!

Saturday:
Rest day.

Sunday:
For the recovery week, my long run was only 9 miles, dropping from the 12 of the week before. Despite missing some miles earlier in the week, I wasn’t tempted to make any more up on this run: I knew I’d need my energy for the rest of the plan. Lolly and I were marshalling at the Junior parkrun, and the plan had been that I would do my run and meet them there, but continuing the theme of the week, I didn’t get up in time! On this occasion though, it was a rare lie-in for my daughter, so I didn’t regret it much. As it was, we headed out to parkrun, cheered the youngsters around, and then I set off with no route in mind at all. If there is anything worse than doing a ‘long’ run when you’re not feeling up for it, it’s doing a ‘long’ run when you have no route in mind! The whole run was a hodge-podge of other routes that I didn’t really enjoy at all, but I got around it and survived the week. And for once, that was all that mattered.

Summary:
Obviously, this was far from my best week. Mentally and physically, I just felt drained. But… that is part of the reason that these plans have recovery weeks, so I guess it was well timed! To be honest, even at the end of the week, I was still feeling pretty knackered, and I knew that training ramped up in week five to eight, with increased speed work, though both weeks five and six included Wednesday evening races. Onwards and upwards I guess…

My life revolves around running

by Lolly

For the past couple of months it feels like everything I do is about running. Timetable. Meal planning. Laundry schedule. Everything. But here’s the kicker – I’m not running.

My latest run on Strava was optimistically called “Trying to start a habit”. Given that was a month ago, it clearly wasn’t much of a success. Truth is, there’s been a lot of other stuff going on. I’m at the end of a college course, and so assignments have had to take priority in the evenings and at weekends. Add the normal tiring elements of work and a toddler, and there wasn’t a lot left.

Does he even own any normal clothes?

But still, the alarm is set early enough for long runs – inevitably causing aforementioned toddler to decide it’s time to get up. The requirement for me to be on toddler duty is based on a running plan. Meals are meticulously selected so that spice does not precede a long run. Each day the laundry basket must be checked for favoured running kit, and the dirty dishes pile checked for recovery shake bottles. And weekends? They’re for researching race routes to decide if there are toddler-friendly cheering points.

In short, I am currently a running widow.

It will change. My college course is almost done. Home life is adjusting to the idea of Ben running so much during the week. And everyone knows that attack is the best form of defence. Time to dust off the trainers then…

Bristol Half Marathon Training: Week 3

by Ben

After some deviations during Week 2 to fit in the Yeovilton 5k, this week was just about following the book, getting the miles in, and trying to hit all the workouts. A bit of travelling, and the hot weather, meant that I knew things would be a bit difficult to juggle around. Especially as Lolly is coming to the end of a college course, meaning that it’s important I can be free to look after the small child as much as possible in the evenings.

Sunshine-free-sun-clipart-public-domain-sun-clip-art-images-and-3

It’s lovely to see, but it does make running HARD!

Book plan:
Monday: Rest
Tuesday: 8 miles General Aerobic + hill reps + strides
Wednesday: 9 miles Endurance
Thursday: Rest
Friday: 8 miles Lactate Threshold
Saturday: Rest
Sunday: 12 miles Progression

My plan:
Exactly the same, no deviations this week!

Monday:
Rest day.

Tuesday:
This run (8 miles General Aerobic with hill reps and strides) caused some agonising, on two fronts, which combined to make about five different problems! Firstly, I was working in west Cornwall, which meant that if I was to travel from home and back, I’d have something like a twelve hour working day. So get out for a run beforehand, I’d need to leave the house before 5 am. Now, while I’m trying to force myself to run in the mornings – and it’s taking a lot of forcing, because I really am not a morning person – there was no way I was getting up when the clock still started with 04 for a run. So then, I’d have to do the run afterwards. In fact, as my parents live in the exact town that I was travelling to, I planned to run straight after the job I was doing, and then travel back after. Except for the second issue: the temperature. Monday had been pretty warm; in the afternoon the temperature got up to around 28 degrees Celsius. It was lovely – unless you had to run in it. Tuesday was forecast to be even hotter, and it wasn’t due to cool off much in the evening either. So back to Plan A: running in the morning? It would have to be. But I still couldn’t face that pre-5 am wake up call, and so I opted for a third way. I would complete my work on Monday, have dinner at home, and then travel down to my parents’ house in the evening, so I could get up early, but not too early, on Tuesday to run.

The run itself went pretty well. My parents live in a pretty small town, and so getting eight miles in involved a bit of fiddling about. It’s also much hillier than Taunton, but that’s fine – especially for the hill repeats at the end of the run. I completed something in the region of 6.5 miles, and somehow even managed to get a “2nd Overall” on a Strava segment. (Which given this was meant to be a General Aerobic paced run, probably means I was going too fast.) The hill repeats were really tough, and on a much more significant hill than the previous week. The strides were also reasonably tough, and I think I embarrassed a couple of school girls who’d sang “running, running” (Naughty Boy featuring Beyonce) at me as I went past them. Only for me to jog back past them, and then sprint past them, and then jog past them, and then sprint past them as I continued my shuttle sprints. Overall a good session, and done before it got *too* hot.

Wednesday:
I had originally planned to run my midweek medium-long Endurance run with the club in the evening, but once again I looked at the forecast and figured that I’d rather run in the relative cool of the morning. So, I quickly pieced together a route, and then at the last moment, decided to run it the opposite way around! Mostly so that I would get the bits where I was running on the road out of the way early, before there were too many cars, and also so that I could run alongside the river towards the end, when it might be starting to get a bit warm. There’s little to say about the run, it was a reasonably easy effort, and perhaps I should have run it a little harder, but I’m still a little bit awed by the weekly distance, and I knew I had harder runs coming up. I did have to slow down quite significantly towards the end, when a herd of cows were in the gateway that I had to go through, meaning that I had to go straight through the middle of them. To our mutual annoyance.

Thursday:
Rest day.

Friday:
The return of the lactate threshold run. I’d skipped this in week two, as I was doing the Yeovilton 5k, and this time I knew I had to push harder on the threshold intervals. One thing that Faster Road Racing repeats over and over again is that threshold runs are one of the most indicative of race pace, and one of the best ways to improve race pace. So most weeks, the lactate threshold run in the key workout, so I want to be getting it right. In week one, I’d ran to heart-rate, and found that I was doing my intervals at about 7:45 per mile, which after some discussion with club mates (well, Scott) we determined was too slow. So this time, I did some research, both in the book and online, and calculated that I should be running the intervals at just slower than 7:00 per mile. The obvious advantage of running to heart-rate is that you can run hillier routes and know that you’re still putting the right amount of effort in, whereas running to a pace means that on a hilly route, you might push too hard uphill, or too little downhill. With that in mind, I opted to run along the canal, to guarantee a lovely flat route for my pace-based run.

With having skipped the threshold run in week two, I’d jumped straight from week one’s 14 and 12 minute intervals to 18 and 15 minutes. At a much faster pace. Oh boy. It was tough. I know this, because Strava told me so. Still, I managed it: both intervals had a pace of roughly 7:05 per mile. Interestingly, my heart-rate was exactly where the book suggested, and where it had been in week one. So perhaps my body was just particularly stressed in week one, and so the same heart-rate equated to a slower run. Who knows. I may well stick to threshold sessions along the canal for the rest of the training plan though!

Saturday:
Rest day, thank God!

Sunday:
Gulp. If I hadn’t been looking forward to the lactate threshold run, I certainly wasn’t looking forward to the progression run. Twelve miles, which was the furthest of the plan so far, but I also had to run faster as I went along, finishing at my threshold pace. It was back to running based on heart-rate for this run, which meant that I was free to incorporate some hills into the run. Which is pretty vital if I want to avoid doing the whole thing along the canal! I basically split the whole run in six chunks: half a mile warm-up, followed by 2.5 miles at 141 to 150 bpm, 3 miles at 145 to 160 bpm, 3 miles at 150 to 165 bpm, 2.5 miles at 155 to 174 bpm, and then a half mile cool down. Within each chunk, I also aimed to increase my heart-rate and pace, but I was less concerned about that.

Pretty much nailed it.

So, how did it go? – Surprisingly well, actually. By mentally splitting the run into chunks, it was easier to motivate myself, and it meant that I was focused on achieving my target for that chunk, rather than worrying about how far I had left to run. I managed to increase my pace (and more importantly my grade-adjusted pace) each chunk: from 8:11 min/mile to 8:01, to 7:50, to 7:20. My fastest mile of the run was the eleventh, which was 7:10; faster than my current half marathon PB pace, which is encouraging. Within each chunk, my pace (and heart-rate) didn’t quite progress as linearly as I would like, so that’s definitely something to work on for this session, but overall I’m happy to call it a success.

Summary:
This week I set out to follow the book exactly, and just try and run strong, and I’m pretty happy that that’s what I achieved. The week ended with two particularly tough sessions, and although they felt every bit as difficult as they looked, I’m happy that I ran both hard, and have no regrets. This is the last hard week of the first meso-cycle; Week 4 is a recovery week, before the focus of the training shifts from endurance to speed work. During that cycle, I have two races planned, the Haselbury Trail 10k (which I also raced last year) and the next Yeovilton 5k, so it will be important to get the balance right between training and racing. But for the moment, I’m feeling pretty good, if very tired, with how the training plan is going.

Quantock Beast: race review

by Ben

For the second year running, I took on the aptly named ‘Quantock Beast’ as the most recent race in the Somerset Series. This is put on by the Quantock Harriers, and is only a few miles outside of Taunton at a National Trust property, Fyne Court. It’s a beautiful little estate; the manor house was destroyed in a fire sometime in the 1890s, but the grounds and outbuildings remain, and we often come up for a ramble around.

As usual, I was packed and ready to go far too early, and we arrived with well over an hour and a half to go before the race. A decent amount of time when you’re at a big city race, probably, when you have to fight through queues and crowds to achieve anything. In a race that attracts just over 100 people, it just meant that I’d turned up at about the same time as the volunteers! Still, I’d rather be early than late.

We opted to park in the ‘overflow’ car park, rather than drive into the estate itself, and when we pulled up I thought that I vaguely recognised the chap in the car beside us, but thought little more of it: the Somerset Series races tend to attract a regular crowd, so it was probably just a case of a familiar face, but noone I actually knew. In fact, I was right – but he had me at a disadvantage:
“Hi, it’s Ben isn’t it?”
Bugger, so he knows who I am – should I know who he is? I rack my brains, but don’t come up with anything. Hopefully this won’t be too embarrassing.

As it turned out, he read this blog, and had seen me at a couple of the Yeovilton races as well – so it was nice to meet you Craig, just a shame that you were running for Wells. But more about that later.

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A pretty good club turn out! (The dog didn’t run…) Credit: Simon Denson

Eventually, some of my club mates began to arrive. In fact, we ended up having a pretty good turnout. I’d known that about half a dozen would be there, but we had more than double that. I headed off with Tim and Iain for a one mile warm-up, in which we tried to avoid hills as much as possible, though it’s pretty tricky in that area! We arrived back just in time for the club photo, and then began to amble over to the road for the start.

The course begins with a long downhill stretch on the road, before heading along a narrow trail up the next hill. Last year, I’d got caught behind one of my club mates, Nigel, who has the general tactic of sprinting downhills and walking uphills. So this year, my main target early on was to make sure that I beat Nigel to the bottom of the road, without killing my legs too much. (How much of racing is like this, small races within the race?) It’s a bizarre feeling, a steep downhill to start a race. Your mind is screaming two things: “Pace yourself, you silly bugger, you’ve got to get around a whole nearly 10k race, and there are lots of up bits later. Long, tiring, horrible up bits.” And, alongside that, “Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!”

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‘Flying’ down the hill. I actually look like I’m trying to slow down, but I promise I was going quickly! Credit: Rach Maclean

For the sake of honesty, it was also saying things such as:
“Hmmm, maybe I could go faster, but Tim is only just ahead of me, and he’s quicker than me, so I probably shouldn’t, because then I’d probably destroy my legs and not be able to climb the hills later.”
“You know, without this massive downhill, maybe we wouldn’t need such a brutal uphill later.”
“What are we having for dinner?”
“Gosh, this road goes on for longer than I remember.”

Then, all of a sudden, we’re at the bottom of the hill, and our mad dash down a tarmac road turns into a careful run along a narrow, climbing muddy trail, with tree roots and fallen branches to watch out for. The good stuff. I enjoy road races, because they set the benchmarks, let me get the PBs that I thrive. But if I’m being honest, I have far more fun off-road, having to be constantly aware of where each foot is going to land, where the path is about to turn, whether the terrain is going to support me properly, or whether it’s slippy, uneven or loose. There’s a thrill that comes from running off-road that simply can’t be beaten, and the more off-road, the better.

Through this first off-road section, I stayed pretty much on Tim’s shoulder. While he’s far quicker than me on the road, I have more trail experience, and I think the two combined to put us at around the same pace early on. I dropped back for a while when I had to stop to dig a stone out of my shoe, but caught back up during a steep downhill which I was willing to fling myself down. I’ve learnt that there’s a trick to racing downhill off-road: Disengage brain, lean forwards, go for it. Mostly it works. Sometimes you incorporate a few rolls into the technique. They aren’t intentional, but they rarely actually slow you down much!

Although there are certainly some significant (at the time) ups and downs in the first half of the race, the major climb kicks in about 2.5 miles through. It lasts for over a mile and a half, and climbs from about 500 ft to 940 ft. Last year, I had found that by using ‘run-walk’ intervals, I either kept up with or overtook those around me. Based on this, I opted to use the same tactic again. But whether I was simply taking it too easy, or the wetter course made the climb harder, or that I just wasn’t as prepared for it, this year I was losing places and time quickly on the ascent. The initial climb is on a wide track, and it was here that I lost most of my places. After a quick drink break at the top of that section, the climb continued, but on much more difficult terrain. This acted as something of a leveller: noone could go too quickly on it, and it probably suited me a little bit more than some others.

I’d lost Tim on the early stretch of the climb, and now I was running along with a lady from Taunton AC (I’ve since discovered she frequently runs with our club on Wednesday nights too.) She’d passed me on the climb, but now we seemed pretty well matched, and I tucked in behind her for the rest of the ascent. As we neared the top, we passed a runner doubled over on the floor by a marshal. As I went past, I glanced down and realised that I knew him from parkrun. I briefly considered stopping, but realised that there was nothing that I could do, and he was with two marshals anyway.

The final stretch: I have to admit, I remember them being further back… Credit: Lolly

After all the off-road climbing, the race finishes just the same as it starts, with a long descent along the road. At this point, I eased ahead of the lady from Taunton AC, and just let myself run at a fast, but natural, pace. I dropped back into Fyne Court, and a glance behind told me that I probably didn’t have to worry about being passed, but there was similarly noone ahead for me to challenge. With this in mind, and knowing that I was a couple of minutes slower than the year before, I eased off a little to the finish line.

All done for another year – but there was the presentation to come. Before the race we’d been aware that there were both male and female team prizes, and we’d been looking around to see how many there were from each club. With me, Tim and Iain all finishing in the top-20, we figured we had a decent chance. The first set of provisional results confirmed this: Iain had finished in 12th, Tim in 17th and me in 19th. Taunton AC had had men finish 2nd and 3rd, but they were their only two. Wells had placed 8th, 10th and 35th. Some quick mental maths confirmed that if the prize was based on positions, we’d have it. It wasn’t. The accumulated finishing times of Wells had beaten us by a full three minutes. If you’d just been a bit slower, Craig… But, there was yet light at the end of the tunnel; we might not have clinched the men’s prize, but our women did win theirs!

This was a great race yet again, and after some problems with runners getting lost in the past couple of years, the organisers put even more effort in this year to make sure there was no chance of anyone going the wrong way at all. All being well, this is already in my calendar for next year.

Bristol Half Marathon Training: Week 2

by Ben

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

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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.

Bristol Half Marathon Training: Week 1

by Ben

When I sat down last winter to plan for this year, there was one thing that dominated my thoughts: a sub-90 half marathon. With two training cycles to improve on my 1:36:37 from last year’s Burnham Half, it seemed a realistic, if difficult proposition. Unfortunately a fall on the coastal path scrapped off my entire spring, so I’m now coming into the autumn a little unsure where I should be setting my target. In my heart I’m still aiming for sub-90, but in reality, I think that has become something of a pipe-dream now.

My current bible.

To give myself the best chance though, I am following a set training plan for the first time. Previously, I’ve always looked at a few and then built myself a plan, loosely based on what I’d seen, and planned around a number of club runs and similar that I did. But, I hadn’t really seen the improvements that I wanted. A couple of people that really inspire me, and have seen massive improvement in their running are Teal, from Miles to the Trials, and Matty, from Running Matters. Both have used the Pete Pfitzinger/Scott Douglas plans from Advanced Marathoning. Clearly, as I’m not doing a marathon, that isn’t any use to me, so I have opted to use a plan from Faster Road Running: 5k to Half Marathon, by Pete Pfitzinger and Philip Latter. (Hopefully all the good stuff doesn’t come from Scott Douglas!)

The plan I am using is the lowest mileage of the half marathon plans; but even this is more than I have typically done in the past. It builds from 31 miles per week up to 47, while I have typically trained from about 20 to 35 miles per week during half marathon training in the past. As a result of this, there is more ‘slow’ running than I have done before, which is a bit of a worry – will I get quicker if I’m running slower? On the other hand, I typically perform relatively better at 5k and 10k than the half marathon, so hopefully getting significantly more distance in my legs will help to counter that. Of course, the plan does have plenty of targeted quicker running as well, particularly in the second meso-cycle, when most weeks have both speed intervals and tempo runs.

So, introduction done, let’s have a look at week one:

Monday: Rest
Tuesday: 6 miles General Aerobic + strides
Wednesday: 8 miles Endurance
Thursday: Rest
Friday: 7 miles Lactate Threshold
Saturday: Rest
Sunday: 10 miles Endurance

Immediately, by mere consequence of being an ‘impersonal’ training plan, this threw up lots of variations from my typical training – I normally try to run parkrun most Saturdays, but I’ve always accepted that this doesn’t fit in brilliantly with training. I almost never run on Fridays, and the concept of a run with two purposes (general aerobic and strides) has never featured in my training.

Monday:
Rest – Nailed it. After a race on Sunday, I was more than happy to take the day off on Monday. I would have liked to have got a decent stretching and rolling session in, but you can’t have everything!

Tuesday:
This session was a combination of two types of running, and it wasn’t entirely clear how this should be achieved. Reading through a few section of the books, I interpreted that the 6 mile session should be made up of 5 miles ‘General Aerobic’ aka ‘Easy’ running, followed by 1 mile of 100 metre sprint repetitions. Due to work and home commitments, I did this first thing Tuesday morning, an unusual time of day for me to be running. The five miles of easy running went okay, although I always struggle to get going in the morning, but then my watch crashed as it tried to go into the sprint reps. This was less than ideal, and I ended up basically doing a fartlek session of ‘I’ll sprint to that lamp-post’, ‘I’ll jog gently until that tree’, and so on. Distance wise, I ended up very slightly short, but I probably didn’t get full value out of the reps by doing them in such an ad hoc fashion, so that’s something to work on for next week. All in all though, an okay start to the week.

Wednesday:
This session, an 8 mile endurance run, which is repeated most weeks, is one that works out pretty well for me: our club meets on a Wednesday evening, and the groups that I run with do around this sort of distance. This week, it ended up slightly short, about 7.6 miles, which normally I could add on to easily, but as we had a club committee meeting after, I didn’t. Running with a group meant that it was harder to keep my heartrate and pace as consistent as I would like, but overall, a good solid mid-week medium-long run.

Thursday:
Rest day.

Friday:
Although I’ve done some threshold, or tempo, running before, I have to admit that it’s not a session that I’ve done anywhere near as often as I should have, and it’s through this training that I think I’m most likely to make improvements. As such, it’s the session that I’m most keen to get right. Described as a 7 mile LT (lactate threshold) run, most of this run is actually at a gentle pace, with two quicker intervals: 14 minutes and 12 minutes at LT pace, with a four minute jog between them. I ran this session based on heart-rate, and like on Tuesday I ran before work in the morning.

The two hard intervals are consistent with each other, but I think they need to be a little bit harder yet.

How did it go? I’m not really sure. My gut feeling is that I didn’t run hard enough – I was at the top-end of the target heart-rate band for the entire LT intervals, but it didn’t feel particularly tough. Looking online, the common consensus seems to be that this should be ‘comfortably hard’, and around 10-20 seconds slower than 10 km pace. My pace was 7:45 in both intervals, compared to my 10 km race pace of 6:53 (from the Round the Tor 10k). Looking at this, and the advice online, I’m going to try running this session to pace next time, and see how that feels, and look at where my heart rate is, and then make a judgement for the rest of my training.

Saturday:
Rest day – no parkrun for me. I’d been tempted to get my volunteering count up, as I’m not far off being able to claim a purple 25 t-shirt, but I didn’t get my act together in time! Mowing the lawn and painting the shed were pretty hard-work, but probably don’t count as ruining a rest day!

Sunday:

Club running

The last time I ran further than 10 miles was the Exmoor Stagger, last October, and although I did run 9 miles a couple of weeks ago, I decided to run with our club’s ‘Sunday All-Stars’ to help me get over the mental barrier of double-figures. It was a good, friendly group, and I didn’t even really notice the distance. We stopped a few more times than I would like – once I’m out I just want to keep running, rather than stop for photos and the like, but that’s the trade-off for running in a group! My heart-rate was right at the bottom of my target band, but given the step-up in mileage, I was perfectly happy with that. A pretty solid run.

Summary:

I was quite concerned about the mileage, particularly given I’ve had a couple of quieter weeks due to a cold, but my body seems to have coped reasonably well. I need to work on including more stretching and rolling sessions during the week, so that my muscles don’t get too tight. My key ‘takeaway’ from the week is the tweaking that I want to do to the LT session, and maybe, depending on how that goes, a tweak to my general heart-rate bands. This coming week I’ll be going ‘off-plan’ very slightly, to fit in the fourth Yeovilton 5k race of the season, and some parkrun tourism for my birthday on Saturday, and as a result I’ll have to sacrifice the LT session to allow those hard runs to fit in.

Tin Tin Ten: race report

by Ben

This race has been the site of a number of ‘firsts’ for me. In 2014, it was the first trail race I had ever taken part in. It was because of this that I bought my first pair of trail shoes, and it was the first time I wore them. It was the first Somerset Series race that I competed in, and this year it became the first race that I had visited three times. This year was also the first time in the last three years that anyone else from my club ran the race. It also nearly became my first ever DNF, but more about that later.

Having raced this three times now, it is interesting to see my development. In 2014, when I took part in this as my first trail race, it was something to be feared. Something new and exciting, an excuse to get new shoes, but mostly I arrived full of trepidation. It was a particularly wet year, and I found the terrain tough, and the hills hard work. Last year, the weather was perfect, and the course was pretty much bone dry. The course was being run the opposite way around from 2014, and I found the balance difficult: the first half was mostly quick roads, while the second half was off-road with more hills, and lots of stiles to wear down already tired legs.

Not a great start…

This year didn’t get off to the best start: nevermind about a DNF, I was worried that I was going to DNS. After getting home pretty early so that I could have a late lunch and a bit of downtime before the race, I headed back out to my car. Which had a flat tyre. After a bit of ummming and ahhhing, I decided to take it to the petrol station and put some air in it, and then see what happened. Probably predictably, what happened was: the air went in… the air came back out. It wasn’t leaking out all that quickly but, nice as Tintinhull is, I decided that I wasn’t willing to take the risk of being stranded there. Thankfully Iain was going to the race, and only works a five minute walk from the petrol station, so I parked my car up and headed over to meet him. Or, more accurately, I headed over to stand outside his building for what felt like forever, while the quick operation he was running ground to a halt, and ended up making him about twenty minutes late! Still, in the end we arrived in Tintinhull in plenty of time to get our race numbers, head out for a warm-up and get to the start line.

It would be fair to say that I wasn’t feeling in the best shape coming into this race. After a week’s holiday at Center Parcs, during which I had eaten copious amounts of rubbish, I had also picked up a cold and tight chest. Thankfully my chest actually felt alright on the Wednesday of the race, after a couple of bad days on Monday and Tuesday: had it still been bad on Wednesday, I wouldn’t have considered racing. Still, lining up at the start, I was feeling okay, though I wasn’t intending on racing hard.

The weather had been wet in the days leading up to the race, but also hot, so the course wasn’t in bad shape: slippy, rather than boggy, except for a couple of parts. One of these came during a narrow section: you turned a sharp bend and stepped straight into it without warning, it could probably have done with a marshal really, but no harm done! (I’ve been stacking up the excuses for a slow time here, have you noticed?)

We headed off, and for the first third of the race, I was going well. I wasn’t taking it quite as easily as I’d intended, but I was by no means pushing myself. In fact, everything was brilliant until about 4.5 km. We were climbing up a hill, and I started to realise that I could quite do with going to the toilet… and not the sort that you can just pop behind a hedge for. Well, not without hording some soft looking leaves first.

Tempting…

My following thoughts went something like this:
“It’s fine, it’ll pass.”
“Hmmm… this rhythm doesn’t seem to be helping. I’ll slow down a bit.”
“This isn’t getting any better.”
“We’re heading back into the village now, I wonder if I can pop over to the village hall, use the facilities and then get back into the race. Except I don’t know which way the village hall is…”
“Okay, now at the stage that just behind that tree looks acceptable.”
“Ooo, that marshal just came out of that house, maybe I could… Oh, too late, I’ve past him.”
“Yes! Finally, it’s eased off!”

By this stage, I’d ticked off another three kilometres. My pace had dropped to a comfortable one, though I was still slowly catching runners, and was only passed by one other. Given that I had the start of a cold, and had already lost any chance of what I would consider a good time, I decided to continue at a similar level of effort to the finish. When I saw Iain, about 20 metres from the finish line, I glanced behind me, saw noone was anywhere near, and continued to amble to the finish line rather than put in any sort of sprint. Not like me, but there we go!

I found the course much easier than I had been expecting. This might have been because of my relaxed pace second half, which would have meant my legs weren’t anything like as tired. Another major factor is the amount of off-road running I do now compared to previous years. Although I’ve not been able to do as much lately as I would have liked, I try to get out on some ‘proper’ hilly off-road routes at least once a week, where before most of my running was on flat roads in Taunton.