Catching Up On Sleep

One of the best perks of Christmas, and holidays in general, is the fact that I can sleep in every single morning and still get my normal mileage. When I say sleep in, I mean until 8 o'clock, that is. Any later than that requires an unreasonable amount of staring at the ceiling and is just not my thing.

Having said that, my mileage this week is actually going to dip, for two reasons. One, I took it easy so far to let the legs recover from the weekend; Monday was especially slow. Two, I'm gradually transitioning into the next training phase, and it's better to take it a bit easier. No need to overdo things when your body has to adapt to a different kind of work.

As I said, Monday was very easy. I ran as slowly as I could without letting it affecting form. The pace turned out to be 8:09, still decent enough, and the HR was the lowest in a long, long time. The fact that I am able to run for an hour at such an easy effort actually pleases me as much as a tough tempo run. It's a mental thing.

Today started out in very similar fashion. I thought about adding a couple of miles but decided against it. After 7 easy miles, I changed things for the last mile, alternating not-quite all-out sprints and walking recoveries until the breathing and HR were back to normal. I did about 6 of these, but I find it challenging to count past 2 when doing repeats like that, so the actual number might be out (not that it matters). The idea is to start activating the "other" muscle fibres that don't do any work during a normal endurance run. You need to activate them before you can train them, and fast sprinting is one way of reaching them (hill sprints work even better).

The weather was slightly more reasonable today, less wind and just a bit of mist rather than rain, but that was just the calm before the storm which is just starting to build as I write this. Tomorrow's run might get interesting.

We're off to Dublin for a few days. I'll probably take in a race while I'm there, though I do feel guilty for missing the 10K in Beaufort yet again. Niamh needs to see her family - and there's another imminent arrival and she fully intends to be there when it happens. New babies are just the best, aren't they? Especially other people's babies that you can hand back for a nappy change and night-time feeds after cooing over them.

26 Dec

8 miles, 1:05:13, 8:09 pace, HR 134

27 Dec

8 miles, 1:04:05, 8:01 pace, HR 142
   actually 7 miles in 7:52 and 1 mile alternating sprinting/walking