Aerobic Endurance

For most of my base training phase I have been feeling very, very good. Even though my fitness clearly improved it felt like I was not really training. On every run (ok, almost every run) I was running well within myself and day-to-day recovery was never in question. This disappeared over Christmas when I managed to overdo it over one weekend; it took several days to shake off the worst of the fatigue, but the feeling of effortlessly gliding over the pavement did not return.

Until a few days ago. All of a sudden I’m back and I'm loving it. The coach told me last week to relax a bit; I followed his advice and all of a sudden the legs are floating again. The effort level is as low as before but the easy pace is knocking at 7:30 again. It was there at the end of November, but that was due to a sharpening effect after the Killarney race series. By now I have not been racing for over 8 weeks, any sharpening should long have gone and I’m left with just me aerobic conditioning. I skipped a lot of races in the mean time and racing would have been fun, but with my eyes firmly set on an April marathon, it sure feels like a sacrifice worth doing.

It suddenly got cold again, but nowhere near as cold as in December. The temperature is close to freezing point in the morning, cold enough to dig out the long sleeved shirts once more. On Monday morning the legs were still suffering a bit from Sunday’s long hills, so I kept the effort very, very easy and was really surprised to see me averaging well below 8-minute pace anyway. I'm supposed to keep the HR between 140 and 155 beats, so an average of 137 is actually too easy but I’m pretty sure the coach prefers me to undershoot the target by 3 beats rather than overshoot it by even one.

Still, I pushed a little bit more on Tuesday and was once more genuinely surprised by the pace, in the 7:30s on average. I'm definitely not used to that being my easy pace. The moon was still out as I left home which made for my favourite conditions, cold and clear and no need for an artificial light source. Just perfect.

Since the boys’ school had closed a week early before Christmas due to the severe weather, their Christmas play had been postponed, but I did not escape for long. Niamh claims to be looking forward to that each year; personally I cling to the hope that the evening will be over before I lose the will to live (and if that makes me a bad parent, so be it). In the end it was the uncomfortable seat that provided the biggest problem, being squished into a chair designed for a primary school kid for several hours is just not my thing, but I do wonder how some others with higher BMI than me coped. Anyway, the plays were actually funny at times, the standard of acting, while uneven, wasn’t too bad and I survived after all. The boys did just fine and stage fright is not something they suffer from.

I even felt inspired enough to run past the same school building this morning, doing a loop through Cromane. The stormy weather on Saturday managed to produce an astounding array of entirely new potholes that I’m not familiar with, none of which I could not see in the morning. There was one I must have hit twice, on the way out as well as the way back, but I managed not to twist my ankle and I'm gradually learning to slalom around them even in the dark. I reckon I could run most of my routes with my eyes closed by now.

17 Jan

8 miles, 1:03:10, 7:54 pace, HR 137

18 Jan

10 miles, 1:16:03, 7:36 pace, HR 142

19 Jan

12+ miles, 1:30:55, 7:33 pace, HR 145