from “Diary of a rubbish marathoner” I have to be careful what I’m writing these days. Niamh occasionally reads this blog, some work colleagues have mentioned it, and now my kids started reading when they saw the Halloween pictures of themselves. Niamh asked me slightly worried if the content is suitable for them. I assured her it is. I think I swore once or twice, but apart from that it’s child friendly. Apart from the fact that it makes Daddy look like a nutcase, that is. Case in point, I went running yesterday and today even though the weather was all but inviting. I somehow managed to time both runs to perfection; both Saturday and Sunday featured downpours of biblical proportion, and yet I managed to squeeze in a run into a nice window of opportunity. I hardly got wet, and the rain either held of or was down to a mere drizzle. I got lucky, because on both occasions it started raining very heavily within minutes of my return.
I was tempted to remove the whining last paragraph from Friday’s entry as soon as I posted it. In reality, running easy isn’t as bad as I made it sound, and most of the time I’m perfectly ok with it. I can relax, and enjoy my me-time. If the weather is nice I can also enjoy the surroundings because after all Caragh Lake does have some stunning scenery, and I never get tired of it. As I found out today, mentally I find it easier to run for 10 miles; 5 miles are so short that it hardly seems worthwhile.
My Garmin started acting up this morning. Initially it didn’t report any HR data at all. When I re-paired it, it picked up the signal again, but as soon as I started running I noticed that the HR was stuck around 100 bpm, which cannot be right. I suspected the battery in the chest strap might be empty, but after 4 miles it suddenly started behaving again, and the readings were fine afterwards. Because of these problems I didn’t get any initial feedback on my HR and it didn’t sound the alarm if I went over 152, so I might have run a little bit fast on the inclines. It was still an easy run, and I enjoyed it. Our garden is water-logged, some local roads are closed, parts of the country are bound to be flooded, but at least I managed to get my runs in.
I started working on my training plan for Boston. I will be following the training schedules outlined in Ron Daws’ book Running Your Best, which is basically Lydiard training. Starting tomorrow there will be 4 weeks of building the mileage, 6 weeks of aerobic base, 4 weeks of preliminary speed, 4 weeks of anaerobic training, 3 weeks of sharpening and 2 weeks of taper. I haven’t got the details worked out yet (and they’ll change as the weeks go on anyway), but I know what I’m going to do over the next few weeks at least.
8 Nov
7 miles, 57:56, 8:15 pace, HR 145
9 Nov
10+ miles, 1:22:12, 8:10 pace, HR 144
