Big dreams – I’ve had some time to consider what I would like to work towards over the last couple of weeks. I reached the end of the current block of training that I was focusing on – the aim had been to run a 5k track race Wednesday gone. My training has gone well, hitting good times, managing to stay fit & healthy whilst completing all of my planned workouts. I was in a good position to race, then got the start lists and saw that my particular race had 53 runners in it, which was also the norm for several other races on the same night. Taking time to think about this I just didn’t feel happy about fighting my way around a track with that many runners so decided to not race. Whilst that was disappointing the condition I had got myself into was really pleasing and a result of good consistent training.
As the race had got nearer I had also begun to mull over what came next. Part of me wanted to avoid this, leaving future planning until after the race had passed. Part of me wanted to dive in and embrace. Once I had made the decision to drop out on Monday this gave me the chance to sit back and think about what’s next. I was pretty sure I’d run London Marathon next year, even more so having managed to complete a solid block of training to work on speed. At the back of my mind was niggling conversations around what happened at Snowdon in May and whether I was ever going to do this again. In light of this I begun to consider how long I would need to prepare – alongside which not compromising my enjoyment of running and ensuring I was able to run well, long. So I drew up a year by year, very general target race list (photo at the top of this) which wasn’t a must do, more a nice to be fit enough to do.
After this I then begun to consider things that I really, really needed to correct for being able to run long again. This is what I see as key to work on:
- I need to be a lot stronger – specifically around down hill running
- I need to fuel a lot more intelligently, which involves taking on more fuel for running
- Supershoes on trails = comfortable less sore feet.
With this in mind I drew up a marathon plan for London, which took me to 28th October, leaving a nice 2 month blank block to fill in. Here I decided to begin the long road to becoming a lot stronger. What I wanted to experiment with was the 2 days on / 1 day off strength build I turned to when injured in my Boston build. The benefit here was that I am not injured, so can take the load. Equally I’m not in any stages of race training, so my main focus can be on lifting heavy weights for a period, with easy running to support this. Knowing that my main focus could be strength work, then the initial DOMS should be easier to manage and let me get to lift a gradually heavier load, before reintroducing more running. I’ve planned to do 6 sets of paired days, lifting a little more every day and then getting to a higher baseline to then work off twice a week when running more.
So this was the very first stage planned. Next was looking at building a nice base in running, regular easy runs, hill sprints once a week to keep a touch of speed, and each week a steady run that got longer by 10 mins from week to week. Nothing hard (80% of marathon pace) but not a super easy relaxed run either. This all happens at the start of cross country season, so every other week from early October I get to pushy a little harder for longer on a rolling course. Then on a Sunday a 90mins – 2 hour easy run to help turn the legs over. To help build this I wanted to include cycling – Friday’s will be cycling day. I may push the effort on this, we’ll see. What I like about this is getting off my feet and getting a nice amount of easyish to moderate work in on a weekly basis.
The 2nd & 3rd points above I’ll get more into as things develop. On the point of shoes on trails. I really, really did get sore. uncomfortable feet in the Salomon SLabs I raced Snowdon in. I raced the Eastbourne Ultra in the Nike Ultra trails, which were so much more forgiving on my feet. There is more conversations from top runners about the shoes that they use – David Roche talking about this following his recent success at Leadville 100. With the development of Adidas Terrex Agravic it seems that a new threshold is being crossed (as with the Vaporfly’s in 2016) and the shoes are going to make signal a paradigm shift in how you can race trails / mountains.
SO TIME TO START.
