My own training is not going too badly either. After some very heavy legs on Monday, entirely predictable after a tough 20 mile run on Sunday, I felt better already on Tuesday and up for another hill session. Even the high knees drill feels better by now. I managed 2 minutes in one go before a break and then added another 90 seconds. I can’t swear that I’m able to lift the knees as high as at the start, but I’m doing my best. The last drill was thigh drive again, which is the one drill that drives the HR up the highest.
Today was the last of the evaluation workouts. It was a bit windy again, but nowhere near as bad as a fortnight ago and I felt this time the conditions would not interfere. I was a bit apprehensive, not sure if I was worried about a bad score or the fast running. But I felt pretty good during the warm up, and got started.
As you can see I goofed up a bit on the last one, running 2 bpm too hard, but for all I can see these numbers look excellent. I think there is definitely a sharpening effect in there from the faster running during the transition phase, but I’m pretty happy. If you compare the figures to previous ones (look at MC’s post here or a collection of my evaluation posts here), you can easily see an improvement.
Mile 1 6:40 (HR 162)
Mile 2 6:48 (HR 162)
Mile 3 6:49 (HR 161)
Mile 4 6:37 (HR 163)
Time to 130: 32 seconds
Actually, I made one potentially massive error this morning, which I only noticed halfway through the run: I forgot to put on my reflective vest. Thankfully I only encountered about 6 cars all morning and they all managed to see me despite my idiocy. The mornings are definitely lighter now than they used to be only a couple of weeks ago. I don’t even want to think about how easily a driver could have hit me.
I made another mistake, once again I caught myself running sub-7 pace during the cool down, just like on Saturday. I think I'd better stop that. There are times to run at strong pace and the cool down is not one of them.
- 14 Feb
- 8 miles, 1:03:40, 7:57 pace, HR 136
- 15 Feb
- 8.6 miles, 1:13:45, 8:34 pace, HR 143
4x30 sec; high knees; thigh drive; - 16 Feb
- 11.75 miles, 1:23:32, 7:07 pace, HR 152
incl. 4 miles evaluation:
6:40, 6:48, 6:49, 6:37; 32 seconds to HR 130
The numbers look good :]
ReplyDeleteYes, I'm learning a lot from your training Thomas. It's nice to actually see how a theory works in practice. Good on you and MC.
ReplyDeleteI pretty much always run too fast in my cool downs too, it's something we have to watch.
At 18 laps to the mile, he'd be a good indoor miler ;)
ReplyDeleteYes, the numbers look good to me too. Are there any long runs (10 miles or so) at marathon pace in the preparation?
A reflective vest would do you no good down here - just give the hoons something to aim the beer bottle at as they drove past.
Hey Thomas,
ReplyDeleteGood to see you're progressing along. One thing that'd be really cool for those of us that check in on you only occasionally (this is Ken in the US from the Dingle Ultra) is can you somehow put a summary of ALL the evaluations up on the Right Hand Side of the page? I'm thinking like in table format, so we can see how your evaluations have changed over time in one place. You of course know how they've changed, because you live them, but for me, I'm not going to page back through your blog and see how they improve.
Anyway, good luck with the race, and I'm rooting for you to smash three hours!
Ken
Better still Thomas if you have time between raising a family, working and training, put it all down in between leather binding with silver embossed lettering and send it to me ;)
ReplyDelete