Don't Mention the B Word

I should never have mentioned Boston. Now look what you’ve done! All of a sudden I really want to go there, but I can already imagine the conversation with Niamh come October. “Honey, I know you have just given birth to yet another baby, but would you mind if I crossed the Atlantic for a few days to run a marathon on the other side?” I can guess the answer, and it’s most likely going to be unprintable, but it probably could be summarised as “yes, actually, I do mind”. To top it all off, the whole scenario is based on the assumption that I’m indeed be able to run the required time, which isn’t a given, considering that it’s 13 minutes below my current PR.

Yvonne’s comment had me smile when she mentioned that the audacity to state such a goal in public must be down to male confidence. Yvonne, I think it’s more down to dumbness, male or not. After all, I’m setting myself up for failure here.

The one thing that’s mostly on my mind is the worry that yet another increase in my training could leave me injured. That isn’t exactly a new thing. When I upped my training from Pfitzinger’s 55 miles to his 70 miles plan last year, I was worried about getting injured. In the end, I was fine. For the following training cycle, when I increased from that level to 85 mpw, I was worried again, and once again, I was just fine. Now I’m going for yet another increase, and again I’m a bit worried. Ron Daws said it best in his book “Running Your Best”. I haven’t got the book here with me, but he’s saying something like “you won’t know how much is too much until you actually do too much”. I now know for sure that 85 miles isn’t too much, in fact, after several weeks of that volume it started feeling downright comfortable. That’s why I think 100 miles might be ok. But there’s only one way to find out for sure.

Our office building has several car parks, and the one I always use is on top of a small hill. When I started my previous training cycle I always noticed how heavy the legs felt when walking up that little incline. After several weeks of training that heavy feeling went away. Instead of congratulating myself on how fit I was, I should have taken it as a sign to move on to the next training phase. My body didn’t get particularly stressed anymore, and all the next few weeks of training did was to keep my level of conditioning at that level. Now I think I should have started hill training at that point, just to give the body something different to adapt to. If the base training goes well, I’ll try to take clues like that to decide when to move on. Live and learn.

I’m slowly building up my mileage, but at the same time I’m trying to stay under 8:00 pace at all times. This can get a bit stressful. I’m a slow starter, and it means I’m usually trying to catch up after the first mile or so. Each of the last few runs felt mildly strenuous. I did question myself if I would be able to keep that level of pressure on at all times, but then I had another thought. According to Lydiard, you are supposed to keep the pressure on at all times, and maybe that means I’m hitting the right pace after all. I’m not exhausting myself. Each run is reasonably challenging, but after each run I know that I could have run a little bit faster if I had to. But I’m only at the start of the training cycle, and I’ll find out soon enough if I’m making or breaking myself.

I had another bizarre encounter yesterday. I thought I was hallucinating as I turned a corner, but there were indeed a dozen or so cows coming towards me. Initially I thought they must have broken out of their field, but I eventually I spotted the farmer following 100 meters behind them. Since they were coming the other way, at least that didn’t interfere with my workout, in contrast to last Friday.

16 May: 11 miles, 1:26:40, 7:52 pace, avg. HR 154 (very windy and drizzly)
17 May: 7 miles, 54:32, 7:47 pace, avg. HR 151 (still windy, but better)