There's Always Hope

I think the less I train the less I am motivated to update the blog, or maybe those things just happen to coincide. I'm not sure.

Last week was another one with low mileage, at least by my own standards, about 45 miles. I had felt totally dead on my feet on Wednesday and Thursday, so I decided to basically bin the long run on Sunday. I still went out, mostly to test out all my shiny new gear I got for next month's ultra (i.e. a rain jacket and a race vest) but it was for not even 10 miles. I also switched into ultra effort, walking all, well, most of the uphills and taking it easy on the rest as well. I even stopped a couple of times and took a few photos, mostly to switch my brain into non-competitive mode.

My long day is actually Tuesday, and the reason for that is that this is the day where we do a long cycle after work. We'll be doing a 3 day charity ride for Laura Lynn at the beginning of September, in Kerry, and I just could not say no to it. I am finding the cycling surprisingly easy and also surprisingly enjoyable, though maybe it helps that the pace is always rather gentle and not exactly strenuous - my average HR for those rides is barely above 100. However, 3 hours in the saddle after work, added to cycling into work in the morning and doing a 5-mile lunchtime run, adds up to more than 4 hours of exercise in a single day and I sure could feel it into the legs for the next 2 days, hence the easing off.

How much that cycling is helping my fitness towards the ultra I have no idea. I do get the long bouts of exercise but they say it's about "time on feet", and obviously when cycling I'm sitting down, so not exactly on my feet. Then again, Eoin Keith used to do a ton of cycling for his training and he wasn't exactly a bad ultra runner at the time, so it definitely does help (admittedly, he got even better when he started doing more running instead).

The plan for the next few weeks is to do a few long runs on the race route, combining training with a recce, though that is made a bit more complicated by the fact that they still have not confirmed the race route, though I have a reasonably good idea (Bray Head, Little Sugarloaf, Great Sugarloaf, Djouce, and then do it all again on the way back).

On Monday I went out at lunchtime with a work colleague who is training for a sub-3 in Dublin. He did an easy run, which for me was steady pace. I was really surprised afterwards to see that I had done basically the fastest run in this training cycle. I obviously knew I was running faster than normal but we were chatting away the whole time and it didn't feel fast. Funny how that works. Also, I had actually been planning to slow down in my training as the ultra approaches, so if that was a good thing or not is an open question. Mind, 5 miles when you're still managing to chat all the way through doesn't sound like I was overworking myself.

It started raining this week. Maybe that's a good thing. It was really humid all summer, I was always soaked right through after a couple miles of running, which may well have been a major contributing factor to me feeling tired so quickly. I'll see, maybe things will improve. Let's hope so.