April is upon us! I have no idea where 2015 is going but it seems to be eluding my grasp and slipping away rather quickly! I thought with March being over I would do a quick review of last month. When I looked at my wall calendar, the one I childishly cover in star stickers whenever I exercise, it looked much less populated than February and I was sure that I was dropping workouts left, right and centre, but when I actually add it up the two months were almost exactly the same in quantity of workouts – the only thing that suffered with my late nights at work was the gym workouts.
| Races | Runs | Workouts | Fastest Pace min/km | Longest Distance km | Longest Duration mins | |
| February ’15 | 3 | 7 | 7 | 06:31 | 11 | 85.4 |
| March ’15 | 3 | 7 | 5 | 06:50 | 16.1 | 113.6 |
The big noticeable distance is in the pace for each month – it looks like March is slower than Feb, but when I look at it in a bit more detail, the 06:31min/km was over a 3.3km run – so I didn’t have to sustain it over a huge distance, the 06:50min/km which was my quickest pace in March was over 8.4km – 2.5x the distance. When I ran at 06:51min/km in February I only did it over 4.4km – so my pace might look slower, but I’m able to sustain it over a much longer distance at that level than for Feb. I think the other big difference with the pace is that I haven’t really done any really short runs in March – I’ve only done 2 under 7km whereas in February I only had 2 over the 7km marker.
Knowing how quickly the work week is flying over at the moment, I’m becoming horribly conscious that my first half marathon is only 10 weeks away and I’ve only covered 10 miles once! I currently only have 2 races booked for April, one tomorrow and the other on the 19th with J both at 10km, and I’m going to spend the other weekends working on increasing my distance. I may also start doing a longer run on the weekday evenings now the clocks have gone forward and it’s actually light in the evenings now!
I noticed at the start of March I felt comfortable for much further and faster when running – and believe this was down in a large part to the weight conditioning sessions I was doing once or twice a week – and which I had a gap of over 2 weeks of at the end of March so I’ve started trying to pick those up again. Having not done it for a while, I did 3 sets of the strength session I’m very familiar with, and although my 2.5kg handweights are now here I did this one with the 2kg ones to get my arms back used to shifting things again – my legs have been kept moderately busy the last month but my arms have not! I also added in two circuits of the following for some extra pain for the legs – the conditioning section from the Thinq Fitness session I did the other week, and I also put my step up to its maximum setting: one thing I’ve never been able to do is a full push-up, and with P & I doing the Gelt Gladiator 5km assault course next month, I’m determined to build up my upper body strength so I will at least by able to help myself over any walls or monkey-bars without needing to be tossed up like a bag of potatoes by someone! I’ve done box press-ups in the past, and once upon a time was able to do a set of 10 three-quarter press-ups, but never quite got all the way to doing more than 1.5 full ones, and I don’t think you can count halves! So, I decided I would work on doing the full ones with my legs straight but using the step to reduce the power needed a bit – I did 5 reps with my hands on the step, and the second set in particular was really tough – I was shaking like a leaf by the second rep but I muscled through! Any more I think I would have hit my nose on the step and been passed out on the floor…we’ll keep working on that one…
Blue Runnings 
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