Week 9 of marathon training saw me drop down the mileage, as planned, in order to recover from two consecutive weeks at an average of 89 miles each. I took Friday off completely, and booked in for a massage as well, as I had ran for 20 consecutive days and was concious of the fact that my body needed a bit of time to take all the recent efforts in.
Still, I managed three quality sessions through the week, so managed to fit all of the most important training in to the 6 days in which I did train.
I ran steady on Monday, Wednesday (double) and Sunday, and put my real effort sessions in on Tuesday and Thursday - with a longer run on Saturday.
In Tuesday's session, I opted for a repeat of the previous Saturday's fartlek session and had a fantastic run out. The session was 15 minutes warm up, followed by 5 x 5 minute efforts off a 3 minute recovery, and a 15 minute cool down. I managed to run each of my efforts at 5:10, 5:00, 4:56, 5:04 and 5:25 pace. The final split was intentionally slower, as I have taken to running my final effort at a slightly more relaxed rate in recent sessions - it is still faster than my intended race pace, but feels substantially easier in comparison to the faster reps that I run before it, whilst making sure that I am holding a bit back in the tank for another day.
This Thursday, me and Rob started our final phase of our marathon preparation together. After 8 weeks of progression work, we have now moved on to doing 10 mile tempos. Last week was the first of these, and I was surprised just how well I took to it on the first attempt. Running 2 miles from the continental pub, along the river and to the docks, followed by 4 laps of riversway dock and then finishing with the 2 mile return back to the pub, I recorded 5:31 average and 55:10 for the ten mile effort. It was a pleasing return, but made all the better by how strong, consistent and relaxed I felt throughout.
On Saturday, I mixed my long run up a bit. After running 23 and 22 miles in the previous two weekends, I dropped back down to 20 miles this weekend. I switched things up a bit though, by running 15 miles as a warm up, before running the Preston park run and then finishing off with 2 miles as a cool down. My first 15 miles were ran nice and steady at 6:28 pace, followed by 3.1 miles at 5:30 pace and then finished off with 2 miles at 7:05 pace. I was left well adrift of Joe Monk, who had a fantastic run to go under 16 minutes for the first time on a difficult course, but overall I was more than happy with my own effort with 16:42 on the back of a big warm up!
After a bit of a lower mileage week, I feel ready now to attack the final 3 weeks of big training now, as things start to get serious and race day creeps ever closer.
Total mileage for the week: 76.5
Average pace for the week (m/pm): 6:24
Total mileage so far this month (August): 246
Total mileage for 2017: 2365.5
Average miles per day 2017: 10.23
