"It's a treat being a runner, out in the world by yourself with not a soul to make you bad-tempered or tell you what to do." - Allan Sillitoe


Wednesday, March 10, 2010

How to make things harder for yourself ...

... always run your Bridges loop in the same direction so you finish up running into the wind and always run one of your interval reps over the Narrows Bridge.

Saturday 6 March - Long run with Sandgroper. Garrett Road loop and then back via Maylands and East Perth. We went out fairly slowly for the first half, probably around 4.40/km pace and then brought it home a bit quicker at around 4.20/km for an average pace of 4.32/km.

We took a gel just past half way.  Mine was a Vanilla Powerbar one.  First time I have had this flavour and it was nice - gave a good boost as well which might have contributed slightly to the quicker second half.

26.6km in 2 hours and 44 secs.

2 hour long run is my longest for a while. Again I felt pretty strong and comfortable on this – not wiped out at all.

Sunday 7 March - 63.87km bike ride with Neil. Down the Freeway to Canning Bridge, along the river to Fremantle, along the coast to City Beach and then home via the Freeway, Northbridge and Burswood. Stop for coffee in Cambridge Street (took ages for the coffee – broke up the ride after 47km).

Nice morning for it but a bit of a late start.  Best ride I have ever had - felt really strong on the hills and could see how people ride all day, although it was pretty hot later in the day.

In the evening we had a family bike ride down to watch the WAMC Twilight Run (An 8.2km round trip). Saw Sugar finish 6th in 17.11 after he ran 32km yesterday. Caught up with a few people and nice to be at a WAMC race without the nerves of running.  Rode the mountain bike and towed Sammie on the Trailgator. It was harder work than it should have been.

Monday 8 March - Moderate effort – bridges loop. Wish I had run in the other direction as the wind picked up about half way in and it was in my face on the way home. 12.8km in 54 mins.

Tuesday 9 March - this was my key workout for the week as I won't be doing a tempo run on Thursday to save myself for the due to Darlington Half on Sunday.

4km warm up (19-20mins) then 6 × 4mins hard/3mins easy. A minute into the first hard rep I was thinking that I had possibly done too much in the previous few days to get top quality out of this workout but I then quickly settled into a pattern. Passed 1km in first rep at 3.25. Didn’t have any km markers for remainder of run but on effort would guess that all were 3.25/3.30km pace.

Hard going for the last three reps – rep 4 was over the Narrows Bridge about 2 mins in, and then reps 5 and 6 were into a stiff easterly wind.

Didn't feel too bad about having to work really hard over the Narrows as we will hit the Narrows at the 8km mark in the Bridges run in a couple of weeks and it will certainly be hard work then.

Probably scrimped a bit on the cool down – only about 1.2km but I hit the turnoff to my street and was pretty tired.

I estimate that I covered 9.8km in the 24 mins hard/15 mins easy section of the run.

Wednesday 10 March (today) - Recovery run. HR got up to 130 fairly quickly but didn’t really go anywhere.

Took it easy as usual and appreciated the recovery day after a few harder days recently.

Had a song stuck in my head – great song but only two lines which kept repeating over and over “Dashboard” by Modest Mouse.  This was a single when Johnny Marr was playing with them and has some classic Johnny Marr rifs.

“Well, it would’ve been, could’ve been worse than you would ever know.


Oh, the dashboard melted, but we still have the radio”.

I have started some preliminary planning for my Gold Coast Marathon schedule.  I have a week between the Bridges and the start of my 12 week marathon specific program.  It's not as bad as it seems though as I have built up to a reasonable base and it won't take much to increase a mid week run and start extending my weekend long run a bit.  I like the planning bit - it's good fun playing around different workouts and ideas.

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