I was forced onto the dreaded dreadmill on Wednesday but, determined to make use of it I did a 6x3min session with 2mins recovery; the efforts were at 7:53 pace which is in the vicinity of my parkrun PB pace. I'm not going to lie - it was hard work but it was "easy" in the sense that I didn't have to think much and unlike a steady or tempo run on the treadmill the time flew by. I was listening to Marathon Talk and happened to have 3 coins about my person so I moved them all one-by-one from one side of the treadmill dashboard to the other (and back) so that I didn't even have my mad mid-run moment (is this number 3 or number 4?) where I can't manage even the basic maths of subtracting the time that my warm-up took and dividing the remainder by the effort plus recovery to work out where I am. I call this "running maths" and it results in some bizarre circumstances where very simple sums become all but impossible mid-effort. Anyone else struggle with this?
A friend and fellow runner has kindly offered to put together a plan for the next 6 weeks which will focus on my 5k times but allow for the Ljubljana Half Marathon too. I was therefore targeted with having a bit of a go at parkrun on Saturday to give us a baseline measure of my fitness (especially since I've not always been giving it my best effort recently). I had a spa day planned with a friend and have missed Cannon Hill (which is my home parkrun) over recent weeks so found myself back there on a morning which was just beautiful - the bright sunshine and autumn leaves along with the time of day being the only things separating this from those "too hot; too hard" summer runs. I warmed up and joined a couple of runners I knew at the start. Unfortunately I got the pace completely wrong from the off - seeing Jude speed into the distance I thought if I could just see her it would get me off to a good start and I'm typically a conservative runner in the early stages, I also thought I would avoid looking at my watch - it might be limiting me to what I thought I could do rather than what I am capable of. Well, now I realise that conservative is not a bad strategy. Looking now at the splits a first mile of 7:36 was clearly a crazy starting pace (according to Strava - which doesn't hold all of my records, just those since January, but is nevertheless a useful guide - I broke my km, half mile, mile and 2 mile records). Then the wheels came off! An agonising last mile and a half, wheezing, people passing me and looking concerned and an unbelievable desire to just stop and lie down. I finally understood the expression to "blow-up". I've had some tough second halves of half marathons and longer races, but I don't think there's ever been such a stark contrast in a 5k race. My last mile was nearly a minute slower than the first. Ouch!
I managed to squeeze under 25 minutes (24:59) for my best time for a few months, but I feel that I could have shaved a bit more off that if I'd paced it more evenly.
Nevertheless I've posted a time to aim at next week and learnt a valuable lesson. Next week it's the road relays and I will definitely go for a steady start and try to finish strong!
I've topped off my biggest running week in some time with a 14 mile run along the canal into town with a few pit stops to collect folks en route - it's another glorious day in south Brum and I collected a couple of owls too... Mojo back and up for the next 6 weeks of hard training!
Man in the background looks like he could use some mojo (or a good night's sleep!) #TheBigHoot2015
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