Week 7 of the marathon training block then, and having spoken in the previous blog update about little niggles and aches starting to creep in, I started this week with the first real scare. Thankfully, swift physio and extra work on the old foam roller has sorted me out again. But whilst taking a day off last week to allow knee niggles, achilles aches and general tiredness to clear itself up, it was the recurring battle with my pesky periformas that was the cause of my first real concern so far.
With hindsight, my 20 mile long run last week - in which I stated I felt leggy and a bit tired - might have just been a tad too close for comfort on the back of a 10k race on the Saturday. Through the day on Monday I started to become increasingly aware of first a general tightness, and then the starts of the now familiar throbbing kicking off deep in behind my right hand glute and tracking across to my lower back. Thankfully, I now seem to have become that aware of the early signs of the problem almost before it has chance to become one - I was straight on the phone to Vicky Birkett to ask about some treatment and she managed to sort me out that same day. By using the foam roller when I got home from work, I even managed to get out and do a very gentle 8 miles before my massage too - having taken Friday off, I didn't fancy another day off training so soon if I could avoid it.
In the past, problems with the periformas have kept me out of action for anything from 3 days to a full week, and that was my biggest worry in the middle of my most important phase of training I've ever undertaken. This time, by getting swift treatment and then reigning back my training to a more relaxed intensity for a few days, I haven't actually had to miss any training at all, which is a massive bonus and also hopefully points the way towards me now being on top of future concerns about this particular injury, as long as I keep on top of it with regular massage.
As I say, I decided to get back to basics for a few days after this, and decided to do a few days of easy running whilst my body caught up on recovering from a hard weekend of work. So on Tuesday I opted against doing any speed work - deciding that Saturday's race had probably been enough of a top end workout for the week - and instead plodded around a nice and steady 12 miles in the lanes, just ticking over at 6:30s.
On Wednesday I doubled up with two easy runs - and my evening run was even broken up into two, as I had to fit it in around the AA engineer having to come out to me after work to replace a blown tyre!
The rest from any real hard training appeared to have done me good, as Thursday's progression run went extremely well. Doing the same 12 mile progression that we have done for the past couple of weeks, we went through halfway at 6:04 pace - compared to 5:58 the week previous - despite that, we were able to gradually and steadily crank it up through the second half, in order to finish up with an average pace of 5:44 for the session as a whole. The last 3 miles were ran at an average of 5:18 and I felt really strong in the final stages too, which is promising.
I doubled up again on Friday, with two easier runs getting some of the lactic and rubbish out of the system. I decided to bring my long run forward to the Saturday morning this week, and it felt good to get a 23 mile effort ticked off, my longest training run of the block so far and equal to my longest training run prior to the London marathon in 2015. I took it very easy through the first half of the run, reaching 6 miles at 6:48 pace and 12 miles at 6:38 pace, before slowly increasing my effort and finishing up with 6:28s for the run overall.
An hour long recovery run of 9 miles on Sunday brought me to the end of the week with another highest mileage week - not bad seen as I started the week worrying that it might have been a bit of a write off!
Something different, which I have really enjoyed doing through this summer so far, has been reading up and studying the sport a bit more and trying to become a smarter and more knowledgeable runner. I have already spoken about reading Charlie Spedding's brilliant autobiography, but I have been doing reading around online and through several different means and sources too.
This week though, something a little bit different and out of the box caught my attention. A post on Twitter by an extreme swimmer - who trains for up to 6 months per swim in the Arctic sea - about the mental and physical challenges that he has to overcome in both the training and the execution of his swim. I found it a fascinating read, and entirely relatable to marathon running. The tweet that I have shared in the photos below in particular struck a chord. There will be a point in Berlin where the pain starts to increase and the little voices in the head start trying to make me doubt myself and what I am trying to do. But no matter how many reasons you can come up with to stop and to ease off and no matter how painful it gets, as long as you have ONE really meaningful reason to keep going, you will find a way to overcome them. I am very lucky to have a very strong network of family and friends that are supporting me through the journey, both out there and back at home, and that will be what I use as my inspiration on the day.
Total mileage for the week: 88.5
Average pace for the week (m/pm): 6:39
Total mileage for the month of July: 367.5
Total mileage so far this month (August): 80
Total mileage for 2017: 2198
Average miles per day 2017: 10.13
