The Sunday before last was a wet reintroduction to marathon training and an enjoyable return to training after a ten day break for illness. Certainly running two hours early on Sunday morning made me feel right at home, all be it a lot warmer than a winter in England! That 25km was just the start of a great week of training and a boost to my dwindling motivation after being sick.
On Tuesday last week I smashed out a 4 mile tempo run in the rain and surprised myself at how good it felt. Although I haven't been doing my cross training recently (lazy) I have got back into hot yoga and managed three sessions last week between runs. Balancing training and enjoyment is my hardest challenge ;)
Thursday saw a very hard interval session come round. Andrew and me had to push hard to crack it. The first half was 2x1600m with a 90s rest between, which we hit target perfectly around 6:15 for each mile. The second half was a slightly different story and we were a little off the pace for the 800m. However it was a strong training session and I felt we were pushing the limits without much more to give.
I later found out that the marathon program, which was based on my 5pm PB, was meant for a 3h 16min marathon! Considering this PB was set at the end of the Gold Coast half I have no excuse not to reach that one day. It just won't be this year as I've set a realistic aim of 3:25, which will be 11 minutes quicker than my Newcastle PB set in April.
With that in mind Andrew and I met up on Sunday morning for a 32km long run. Having run the previous week's 25km at an average of 5:20/km in the rain I thought an average of 5:10 would be achievable. The program said 5:03 was the target so I thought this would be a reasonable adjustment.
After running 3km from UTS we met up with Achilles chairman and legendary distance runner Ellis and ran our first 13km around a 5:00 per km pace. This felt challenging but we were still able to chat, so it was an enjoyable stretch of the legs past the Opera House and over the harbour bridge. On returning to the art gallery we still had 18km left to run to get back to the start so we headed out towards my "hood" in the Eastern Suburbs. Taking our run along Oxford Street at 830 in the morning is always interesting as late night revellers spill from the pubs and clubs, still partying from the night before. It makes you feel good that you are doing something healthy (relatively speaking) though and a gave us a push up the hill. As we ran past Centennial Park (CP) and through Bondi Junction we saw plenty of people heading to the colour run to get splattered with paint. At several points over the next 10km I thought I'd rather be doing that than running for three hours! As we came around CP we scoffed gels and took on a little water to get us through the last ten kilometres. That certainly helped, but our legs were feeling those last few kms and it was with a great relief (on my part at least) when we got back to UTS.
Our average was 5:13/km and I think we agreed that it may have been better if we hadn't smashed the first 14km quicker with Ellis. However these are the days to make our mistakes, mix things up and find what works and what doesn't. Come race day we will be ready to take on the distance.
I think there will be a fair few training days of rain coming up, which is fine by me. Next weekend is a faster 25km run, but I'll update you on my sessions before then.
Until next time, happy training,
Tom :)
No comments:
Post a Comment