My Favourite Workout

I'm not religious, but the last two years I have always used lent as an excuse to give up sugar. This has nothing to do with faith, just a convenient opportunity to shed a few pounds. The Tralee  marathon is earlier in the year than any other spring marathon I have ever done, so I was planning on starting the sugar-free period earlier, but it just never happened. My will power obviously has its limits. I wasn't even sure if I would do any sugar-free time this year at all but when Niamh asked me on Sunday if I would give up sugar for lent again I said yes - so here I am, jonesing chocolate already, but hopeful that the cravings will stop eventually. I know going off sugar has plenty of benefits, and I am not even talking about running; apart from a couple of shed pounds I always notice that my skin improves and I feel better. I still can't see myself going off chocolate completely. It's my one dirty little secret. But my main motivation is still that I will have a couple of pounds less on my frame than the present 148 ones when we gather on the Tralee start line.

After the series of easy runs following last week's race I did one workout this week. After getting up at dark-thirty once more I ran 15 miles yesterday morning, alternating half-miles at slightly faster-than-marathon pace (6:20-6:30) with miles at slightly slower than MP (6:40-6:50) eight times, and the numbers came out as follows (pace in minutes per mile, as always):
     6:20 6:43
     6:28 6:43
     6:28 6:39
     6:24 6:41
     6:27 6:45
     6:18 6:45
     6:27 6:48
     6:28 6:47
The effort oscillated between comfortable and bloody damn hard, depending on wind direction and elevation change, but I am very happy with the numbers; I could have done more at the end. After some feedback I decided that this was probably my last big workout for Tralee, from here on I need recovery more than additional work, but I will do a few faster runs, like half-mile repeats, to get the legs used to faster paces. Hopefully this will make marathon pace feel easier come race day.

Oh, and there are still a couple of races at the weekends.

14 Feb

15 miles, 1:42:00, 6:48 pace, HR 159
   8 x (0.5 miles MP+, 1 mile MP-)

15 Feb

8 miles, 1:00:18, 7:32 pace, HR 139