parkrun

Oh my, it's the weekend already. How did that happen? And it's a bank holiday weekend, and it's nice and sunny outside!

The week has gone in a bit of a blur, there was so much to do after just moving into a new home, I hardly had a minute to sit down. My training was my commute - every day I was either running into work or back home. The route is rather hilly - there's a steep uphill on either end of it, and a couple of smaller hills in the middle as well. It's probably good training. It also messes up my HR training data - of course the figures look worse when you're running hills all the time, so I just have to ignore those numbers for a while until I can get a sense of the new baseline.

The legs have been tired on quite a few occasions; when I run home in the evening and then back to work the next morning I can always tell that the legs don't appreciate only 12 hours of recovery. Also, the mountain runs from the weekend definitely left some mark during the first half of the week. I decided to ditch any ideas of speedwork for a few days.

However, I'm not driving to Kerry this weekend (they're coming up instead), and with the morning so nice and sunny I couldn't resist visiting my nearest parkrun, which now happens to be in Shanganagh park. The preparation wasn't ideal: Cian flew in from Barcelona last night and I had to collect him, the plane was delayed and landed after 1 o'clock and by the time we were home in bed it was past 3 am. Did I tell you that I wake every morning around 5:30 am, no matter when I go to bed? Turns out that's still the case, even after going to sleep at 3, so just about 2 hours of sleep was all I got, and no chance of getting any more, believe me I tried.

Nevertheless, at the parkrun itself I managed to surprise myself by running a minute faster than during the previous attempt, though Shanganagh is as flat as it gets, in marked contrast to the crazy hills of Cabinteely. That didn't stop that 10 year old kid blasting past me halfway though the course, who finished in about 19 minutes. At the age of 10! Very impressive, and if there hadn't been an overseas visitor he would have actually won all out, ahead of every single adult (bound to happen anyway, though). Oh, and his almost-as-young sister was first female. Some impressive genes at work here.

Anyway, I was happy enough that my ageing, creaking, tired legs were still able to run a sub-20 5k without any speedwork whatsoever. My HR once more only averaged 169, though it rose steadily throughout the run and I definitely finished under the impression that I had run as hard as I could - a bit of speedwork would get the body and particularly the mind used to that pace and effort again and I am sure I would cut a significant slice of that time - but that's not going to happen any time soon, I have bigger fish to fry.

30 Apr

10.75 miles, 1:26:58, 8:05 pace, HR 141

1 May

10.2 miles, 1:26:01, 8:25 pace, HR 140

2 May

14.28 miles, 1:59:33, 8:22 pace, HR 137

3 May

10.2 miles, 1:21:04, 7:56 pace, HR 141

4 May

10.25 miles, 1:24:25, 8:14 pace, HR 141

5 May

11+ miles, incl. Shanganagh parkrun in 19:49, 6:22 pace, HR 169, 4th place