Two solid days

Last two days have been good solid workouts and apart from a little bit of soreness in my right achilles (took a long time to warm up this morning for obvious reasons), I'm feeling pretty good afterwards. I think it helped getting a proper night's sleep last night and not staying up watching cycling and cricket. I know that I am not getting enough rest so will have to try and show a bit more willpower/restraint.

Monday - Following a 5km warmup, I did my hill repeats up and down Banksia Terrace. This time I did 10 @ 3km pace/effort and was really feeling the lactic acid in my legs towards the top of the hill from about the 7th repeat onwards. Last time I did this workout I only did 8 repeats so it was bit harder this time. I finished with a 3km or so warmdown jog so think that all up this workout was around 15km with lots of good quality in there.

Tuesday (today) - up bright (!!) and early to get out the door for a 23-24km medium long run. My run out to Matilda Bay and then back around the river via a detour out to the Marathon Club measures as 23.4km on Map My Run so I did that one. It was bit chilly at 6am to say the least and was certainly beanie and gloves weather. Long sleeve top but no tights. Not a cloud in the sky and no wind made for a morning when it was just nice to cruise along looking at stars. There was quite a few cyclists out, especially on Mounts Bay Road but they were all very polite unlike the bad case of "bike rage" that I witnessed/heard yesterday. As I was running up near the Causeway (but at least 400m away from it) I heard a cyclist giving a runner/runners an absolute earful of abuse because apparently they hadn't moved over far enough when he had yelled at them earlier. Lots of swearing and unfortunately quite typical of the arrogance of a lot of the cyclists who seem to think it is beneath them to share the "dual use" paths around the river. I know what I would have said to him ...

Anyway 23.4km in 1 hour 44 minutes is right where I want to be in terms of my McMillan calculated pacing. I was actually out there for 1hr 45 mins but stopped for 1 minute for a drink and a gel after 61 mins. Not "pit stops" today - hooray!!

Simon has sent me a good link to a story about Hendrick Ramaala. The main thing I took from it was the quote, " Don’t overtrain or overdo things, as that leads to burnout and injuries. Build up your training slowly, because as a recreational runner you don’t have enough time to do what full-time runners do — for example, heavy loads of training, taking naps after training or training camps".

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/09/an-elite-athlete-training-without-a-coach/#more-8803

I also found this link the other day. You can't read the whole book online but you can still read heaps of it, especially most of the chapters on Rob De Castella and Steve Jones. I think I will try to track down a copy of this book at a library or get our library to borrow it from another for me.

http://books.google.com/books?id=O6I-WcoG5egC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Running+with+the+legends&client=firefox-a

The De Castella chapter really stresses the need to be patient and trust your training and that real improvement comes over a period of years not weeks and months. Consistency and doing everything you can to minimise the risk of injury appear to be the key. I was also interested to see that he did a 3 mile tempo run before his hill workouts. I found my hill workout hard enough with just a gentle warm up but it is worth considering a bit later in my training cycle I think.