A Different Stimulus

Very deliberately, this week's training was very different to the previous three. After a bout of heavy endurance training I am now trying to give the body a different stimulus.

The first few days were all about recovery; (almost) 3 marathons in a row are bound to leave some fatigue in the legs and while I might be flirting with overtraining I'm obviously trying not to overstep the mark. Once I felt better, which happened sooner than expected, I did a few extra things: first there were hill sprints on Thursday, which went reasonably well and doesn't ever seem to cause soreness the following days, no matter how sore the legs are for the rest of the day itself. After a few I start to get some tightness in the chest about 20 or 30 seconds after the sprint itself and I start to feel nauseous, which is generally the signal to pack it in for the day.

I followed this up with a parkrun on Saturday. It's been almost a year since my first and up-to-now only appearance at a parkrun. Back then I had gone with eldest daughter Lola but that was also the day I started feeling my injury, though I'm fairly sure the parkrun itself had a very minor role in this. This time round Lola declined my invitation and I went off on my own. With Alan in attendance, who had a few years ago paced 3:15 in Cork with me but who has gotten amazingly good since then, nobody else needed to worry about winning finishing first, but that was never my goal anyway, I ran at slightly below race effort, though it was still enough to put some pain on. I finished in exactly 19 minutes on my watch on a rolling course, though they took a second off in the official results, which gave me a sub-19, not that that is anything to write home about.

Despite some hesitation if it really was a good idea, I added a few more miles in the afternoon, and to ensure that the effort would remain very easy I did it on the treadmill, despite the sunshine outside.

I did manage to soak up plenty of rays on Sunday morning to make up for that by running on the mountainy Kerry Way trail over Windy Gap into Glenbeigh and then back again for a second climb, Since the legs left me in no doubt that the race parkrun had left its mark I kept the effort as easy as possible, though "easy" is relative on a mile-long climb that averages 17%.

The mileage has been fairly low this week due to the recovery part. I'm going to crank this up again but will try and make sure it will be done mostly at easy effort. Belfast is only 5 weeks away. There are really only 2 weeks of proper training left!

My left knee is a little bit sore. Not bad but obviously I don't want it to get any worse. I'll take it easy on the squats and the other S&C training for a bit.

19 May

7 miles, 1:03:35, 9:05 pace, HR 137, hill sprints

20 May

am: 8 miles, 1:02:58, 7:52 pace, HR 143

pm: 4 miles, 34:11, 8:32 pace, HR 130, treadmill

21 May

am: ~7 miles, including Killarney parkrun in 18:59, 6:12 pace, HR 173 (3rd place)

pm: 5 miles, 44:33, 8:54 pace, HR 136, treadmill

22 May

12+ miles, 1:54:45, 9:27 pace, HR 143, Windy Gap

Weekly Mileage: 68