I am still very much enjoying the challenge of training for something so different to what I am used to, and seem to be coping quite well with the higher mileage. This week was once again my highest ever mileage week, which has now been the case in 5 out of the 8 weeks of training in the block so far. I have been almost touching 90 miles for the last two weeks, and as such will take another drop down week in the week ahead in order to allow my body to recover. This way I am hoping I will be good to go and really push on for the final weeks of hard training before the taper.
The main sessions that I try and make sure I fit in each are a tempo and an interval/track session, to work on my speed endurance and my top end speed, as well as my long run. Usually, I would do some sort of interval session on a Tuesday, with a tempo on a Thursday and my long run on the weekend. However, this week was slightly different. The penultimate race of this year's interclub series was hosted by Chorley and it was on Wednesday, so I had to restructure my week a little bit to fit around that.
I had two days of steady training on Monday and Tuesday, before the race in the middle of the week, in order to keep myself fresh. The Chorley interclub route is a tough little two and a bit lap course, with an off road section early on in the race, and two times up a fairly long and steady climb up along the outside of Astley Park. It is a challenging route and one that keeps you running hard and honest all the way through. The undulating nature of the course means that it isn't really quick, but tests your strength and stamina and provides a good bit of hill work.
I managed to get a good start and had a very solid run, winning by a fairly comfortable margin of around 90 seconds. My time of 25:03 was pleasing for the 4.8 miles, as it was only about 8 seconds slower than the time I produced on the same course 12 months ago when I had a really hard fought battle with Luke Betts and David Rigby and came second place, having been pushed and made to really work hard all the way around. This time around, with a comfortable lead, the challenge was a bit different, and it was a case of me needing to push myself to keep going strong and not relaxing and easing off.
I had a couple of easier days on Thursday and Friday to allow myself to recover properly from the race, as I could tell I was feeling tight and leggy. A massage on Friday sorted that out again though.
I fit my second speed session of the week in on Saturday lunch time, and opted to do a fartlek session around a ten mile loop of the lanes. This is one of my favourite 'go to' sessions, and really gets me working hard. I do a 15 minute warm up, before jumping straight into 5 x 5 minutes efforts, off a 3 minute jog recovery. I then finish with a ten minute cool down. By keeping moving at a decent rate through the recovery sections, you are almost training your body to recover whilst still having to do some work, just as it needs to if you put a surge of effort in during a race. This time around my 5 minute efforts were ran at 5:11, 5:01, 4:57, 5,11 and 5:20 pace. During my recovery phases, my pace was still up around 6:05 pace, which was pleasing.
I completed my week with a long run of 22 miles at an average pace of 6:30 on Sunday to round off another good week of work.
One final little note for this week, is that I have finally joined the Strava running geek family 😂 so if anybody wants to see my weeks training in any more detail, or whatever, then feel free to add me 👍
Total mileage for the week: 89.5
Average pace for the week (m/pm): 6:23
Total mileage so far this month (August): 169.5
Total mileage for 2017: 2287.5
Average miles per day 2017: 10.21
