Author: Buck

Week I

Bit of a fail week. After the great progress of the last few weeks it’s disappointing, but I’m taking the positives from it.

I’ve been feeling throaty, chesty and weak in patches again. Not ideal for running. Wendy’s had the same. I got an early o’clock start on Wednesday at work, felt weak and useless all day, and ended up not going for my run when I got home.

I’ve not been blogging apart from to note my running. Thought I’d catch up in general.

Wendy has just brought it up, about my boat. I’ve not been to the club in ages as it’s the middle of winter and freezing. My last outing was when I turned turtle and found my mast embedded in the lake bed and was contemplating possibly dying trying to swim to shore. I’ll not lie, that has taken a bit of the shine off. Then Wendy has said it took her mate years to learn how to sail. Huh. I thought the few lessons would suffice with a bit of practice. I’ve not given up on it yet. When it warms up I want to get back to it. I’ll see how I get on.

The other thing that’s not about running is my cheapo ‘phone. I like the long battery, but it is just too cheapo. I’ve had to change my home screen picture because the screen can’t do black convincingly, and the camera is awful.

I might as well stick all my boring running posts into dedicated blogs. These are only of interest to me, and will be a good record of my attempt.

My New Years’ Resolution is to run a marathon in under 3 hours.

I started off from two months of no running, resting a foot injury. I saw the physio on the 13th of December, he said it was a trapped/ injured nerve in my left knee (probably from slamming into that van sideways on my motorbike, 2 years ago). He gave me some stretches to free it up and told me to crack on.

Further to my latest boring running blog.

I was saying how hard it is, but at least my foot is holding up and I’ve not had any plague weakness, so I am good to train and make up the lost fitness.

Then yesterday at work I came over all weak and useless. I really thought it was the plague weakness/ Post Viral Fatigue. I was gutted. They say you have to train within the envelope of what you can do, and slowly push the boundaries. Doubling my miles in a week, whilst going faster, sounded like a perfect example of going outside of the envelope.

I’ve been looking at training plans for my marathon attempt. The one in the Advanced Marathoning book, which I’ve been recommended on several occasions, is not 80/20. (80% very easy, 20% flat out.) That guy on Twitter who’s represents Great Britain as an age grouper, and wins the odd race outright, swears by 80/20. It’s the big thing with all the cool kids. But Advanced Marathoning is of the philosophy “Long slow runs produce long slow runners.” Their plan is push, push some more, rest, push again. To be honest, that works for me. I like challenging myself on my runs. Anyway, in the spirit of keeping with the science I spent an evening googling 80/20 training plans. There was a lot of chatter on the forums, but nothing concrete. I read “P&D” recommended a few times. The comment that summed it up seemed to be “P&D is the best plan off the peg.” Further Googling: What does P&D mean? Pfitzinger and Douglas. The authors of Advanced Marathoning. *sigh* That’s a few hours of my life I’m not getting back.

So I started the plan. The first day was a rest day/ cross training day. I decided to break out my £20 rowing machine for half an hour then do another half hour on other strength training. Today was a 7 mile “general aerobic” run with 10 x 100 meter strides in it. I think that means a run where you are not killing yourself but are pushing on a bit, with 10 sprints included. I used to aim for a steady 8 m/m when I was fit, so I thought 8.30 would still be enough to slightly tax me. Oh very dear. It was killer! I did it, and, with the sprints, managed to average 8.14 m/m, but it had no right to be that hard.

I’ve been getting a lot of wake-up calls about this sub 3 attempt. “Bare minimum is an 18 minute 5K (I’m currently 22 minutes) a 38minute 10K (no idea, never tried the distance) and a 1.25 half marathon (my PB is 1.33:37, I’m way off that now.)