Running with my Head in the Clouds

Beep! Thursday, 5:10am, and the smoke alarm lets me know that its battery is running low. Which is great in one way, we wouldn’t want to be caught out by a faulty device if worse comes to worse. Problem is, at 5 am in the morning I can’t change the bloody thing, and every 30 seconds ... “beep”. Great. The one night Cian actually sleeps through in his own bed instead of bouncing around in mine, I get this. Beep. I could get up and remove the battery, but it’s 5 am and I’m too tired to get up and surely I’m just about to fall asleep again. Beep. No I’m not. Sigh. This equivalent of Chinese water torture lasts until I finally get up at the planned time of 6:10 am. I’ve just lost an hour of sleep, though the rest of the family kept sleeping peacefully and I remove the offending unit before I go out running – and I do buy a new battery at lunchtime.

The run itself was good; since this is supposed to be a taper I added a second easy day after Tuesday's 800s, and I spend the next 81 minutes trying to keep myself from running too fast. The legs want to go faster but the mind is keeping the breaks on. I ran sub-8:00 on Saturday because it felt so easy, and had a bad workout the next day. I want to avoid the same mistake. It works reasonable well.

Friday is the day of the dress rehearsal. I’m wearing the same shoes, socks, shorts and maybe even the same t-shirt (though that’s weather dependant) that I’m planning to use on race day, and I want to run as much as I can at race effort. I deliberately said effort rather than pace, because I’m going around Caragh Lake, and that’s a lot hillier than the marathon course. The one thing I’m keen on testing are a new pair of insoles in my shoes. The lightweight trainers are notorious for giving me big bad blisters on my left foot, and I’m hoping new insoles will do the trick. Unfortunately it’s raining heavily, but who knows. This may well happen on race day, too.

The first mile goes by in 8:10, which is fast enough for a warm-up mile, but it does leave doubts in my head. I don’t want to lose nearly a minute over the first mile, but I try to keep that thought out of my head for the time being. I try to gradually accelerate over the next two miles, and get the pace down to 7:40. Then the hills start, first 1.5 miles of continuous climbing, then some ups-and-downs, and two or three miles of downhill. At the top of the hills I notice a dense fog, then I realise that it’s the low clouds coverage that’s responsible for that. I’m literally running with my head in the clouds. After about 40 minutes at least it gets bright enough for me to turn off my headlamp. I much prefer running without; whenever the lamp is on I only see the small cone of light in front of me, and I’m much more aware of my surroundings when I can turn the damn thing off, just as long as I can make out the road.

I hammer the climbs and run reasonably hard on the downhill sections, and I reach Blackstones Bridge, slightly over 9 miles into the run, in 1:07. Not bad, considering the terrain. There’s no time to relax, another 200 feet climb is starting, and by mile 12 the worst of the hills is behind me and it’s taken me 1:30 to get that far. The rest of the road isn’t exactly flat, I guess you could describe it as undulating, but that’s where I want to get down to marathon pace. I feel pretty well, the biggest concern is once more the fact that I’m prone to lose focus, and whenever that happens I slow down a bit. But I manage pretty well, and I cover the last 5 miles in 36:25 (7:17 pace). It's close enough for me to be satisfied, with the race-day adrenalin and the hopefully flatter course the same effort should yield at least 7:15. I feel ready. I just have to try and avoid doing anything stupid for the next 16 days.

The new insoles seem to work, I'm officially blister-free. The main area of concern is my right hamstring, which got painfully tight over the last 2 miles, but there's no need to panic just yet.

20 Sep

10 miles, 1:20:57, 8:05 pace, HR 139

21 Sep

17 miles, 2:06:07, 7:25 pace, HR 151
last 5 in 36:25 (7:17 pace)