Lonely

I really miss Niamh and the kids, and I can't wait until Sunday when they come back from Dublin, but there is no doubt that running life is much easier in a single household. There are no problems with delays in the morning because the boys are awake and want breakfast and/or entertainment, I can do my strengthening exercises without an interfering baby or 4-year old, and I have plenty of peace and quiet in the evening to relax. I guess I should make the best of it while it still lasts. The barely controlled chaos that comes with 4 young children will return in 2 days.

In the last few weeks, Wednesday's workouts have always been slow, because I'm always stiff and tired the day after the hill repeats, and this week was no exception. The first mile took more than 9 minutes, but luckily I found a groove thereafter and managed to bring the pace down to almost average 8-minute miles at the end. The biggest mishap of the day happened in the evening when I managed to spill an almost full cup of tea all over my computer's keyboard, which promptly expired. Luckily I work in an IT department, and there were plenty of spare old keyboards around, one of which is now at home. As a work colleague mentioned, I should count myself lucky it was not a laptop. That would have been expensive.

Yesterday, Thursday, was fartlek day again, with 8x75 seconds at 1-mile pace. Again, I aimed at 5:40 pace, which is my mile pace according to the book's charts, even though I cannot imagine running an entire mile at that pace. I was already knackered after 75 seconds of that, which covered less than a quarter of a mile. I ran the repeats along the Caragh Lake road towards Killorglin, which is fairly flat, but not quite. I was quite surprised afterwards when I checked the results that the first seven repeats were all within a few seconds of each other, despite the fact that some would have been on a net uphill, and others on a net downhill part of the road. The last repeat was at 5:18 pace, but don't get excited, there was a drop of almost 30 feet over the length of it. Still, it was cool to see such a low figure on the screen. I was really pleased with myself when I got home. This was a tough workout, but I had nailed it.

I'm basically phasing in the double headers, where you run tempo one day and a long run with a strong finish the next. The fartleks are standing in for the tempo runs at the moment, and I upped my long run to 15 miles today. Since that happens to be the distance of the loop around Caragh Lake I was back on that old favourite of mine, for the first time in about 7 weeks, well before the Cork marathon. The hamstrings were both rather tired from yesterday's workout, and I wondered how I would be able to get over those major hills, but I managed ok. I was a bit slow, but from a cardio point of view I was doing fine. It was just the legs that were not really cooperating. By mile 7 fatigue crept into the system, and I was wondering if I would be able to stick to the original plan and speed up from mile 10. Speeding up I managed, but it was very, very hard work. The faster section starts with a hill, so if you try to hit a pace you're playing catch up almost from the start. I didn't quite hit the pace I wanted, 7:27 was all I could do. That was a lot faster than what I would have thought possible at mile 7, but a lot slower than the marathon-pace figure I had in mind when writing the schedule. It didn't help that I was running against an increasingly strong wind, and that it started raining at that point.

The rain never stopped, and after breakfast it was lashing no holds barred. This gave me the perfect excuse to take the car to work for the first time this week instead of the bike, but in all honesty I had made that decision at mile 7 already, and not even beautiful blue skies would have gotten me on the bike today. I kept telling myself that I should not be so exhausted after only 15 miles, but I guess I have to take the lingering fatigue from Thursday's workout into account.

I won't be at my best for Sunday's race, of course, but that's fine. The target is again to suffer as much as possible. I just hope this time it's because of the pace rather than a stomach upset.

9 Jul

7 miles, 56:10, 8:01 pace, HR 144

10 Jul

7 miles 53:28, 7:38 pace, HR 154
incl. 8x75 secs @ 5:41 pace average

11 Jul

15 miles, 2:00:13, 8:01 pace, HR 147
last 5 @ 7:27 pace