Blue Runnings

Well, I don’t know where the time went, but it’s Gelt Gladiator day! Having not done a huge amount (read: any) prep for it in the last few weeks, I have only my last few preparations to share – how I manage will have to come later…

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You may have noticed a lack of posts lately…this is because I only post something when I’ve done some form of exercise or have some nuggets of gear-related information I want to bore the internet with. Ergo…I haven’t been doing much the last few weeks. At the tail end of April, I started really feeling just generally sapped in terms of my exercise levels and wasn’t finding it easy to motivate myself to go out, particularly for the longer distances I wanted to hit for my half marathon build-ups. It’s now under 5 weeks until I head to Liverpool, and I really need to find my stride again. Literally.

For most of this year I’ve found running to be a welcome break from, well, everything really. It’s been my me-time when work’s been busy and very changeable, my self-esteem booster as I feel fitter and a great way to meet new people after moving to a new area. Lately however I’ve only found it to be a chore. I don’t want to go out, and when I do push myself to I feel like I’ve got lead in my trainers and just want to get it over with more because I need to go than because I want to.

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Another month disappeared! April has at least been a good month from a pushing one’s self perspective – I’ve run further and faster than I’ve done previously. My previous longest run was the Thirsk 10 in March, which took me 1:53:33 to do the 10 miles/16km. This month on a training run I covered 11miles/18km in 1:57:12 which I’m really pleased with 🙂 I haven’t done either of those distances since…13km being my longest for the last 2.5 weeks but it’s important to stick to the positives for fitness 😉

I’ve also come my closest yet to hitting a sub-60 min 10k at the Tyneside 10k, coming in at 1:02:04. Maybe this month I’ll get it…I have high hopes for the Great Manchester Run…just need to get back into training again 🙂

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Definitely not feeling it this weekend. My intention this Thursday was to have Friday off (check), run the parkrun at Blackhill on Saturday (nope), and then do a longer run on Sunday (just about). I missed the parkrun on Saturday by getting distracted by completely purging my wardrobe (seriously, about 70% of my clothes are in a big black bag right now) and was just generally unmotivated to get changed and get my butt out the door. So my aim to attend every parkrun in April, knowing I didn’t have any conflicting events has been a flop at the final hurdle. Ho-hum – pick up and try again!

I woke up this morning to the alarm call of a sparrow and a morning visit from the pusskins, looked out the window to a beautiful sunny morning, went to fill up my bird feeders (not that I’ve seen many birds lately, a pair of sparrowhawks have moved into the area and all my little garden birds have just gone to ground 😦 ), grabbed some breakfast and then realised it was 06:30. Seize the day and all that right?! P is night shift tonight, so I pottered around in the morning sunshine, kicked him out of bed at nine so he’d be able to go back to sleep this afternoon and I’d go for my run then so my bimbling about wouldn’t keep him up. We were intending to take advantage of the bright morning and go for a walk round the bottom of the Derwent Reservoir, across the dam to the visitor centre – we’ve been down to the dam before but never quite made it further. Unfortunately by the time we got there around 10am, I was for some reason feeling incredibly tired, and with the wind picking up and the roar of several dirtbikes echoing across from the other side of the lake I was really not feeling up to it today, so we wimped out and turned back in relatively short order.

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Another trip down the river after work – I met J down by the river for a jaunt around the lime heaps before I picked P up from work. We did a total of 4km, but had to do a couple of loops around the car park to get the last 0.5km! We did the same loop around the Spetchells we did the other day – heading round the back and then when we came back around to the river side we headed up the side and over the top. The hill up the side of the hill is deceptive – it starts shallow-ish, then has quite a steep bit, but what you can’t see from the bottom is that from the top of the steep bit is another long stretch which is about in the middle of the other two stages in pitch…

J, feeling really ambitious at the bottom, decided that we’d try and run up it and see how far we could get – we walked this stretch last time and carried on our jog at the top. I’d headed up first, and made it all the way to the top – but only because the point when I wanted to give up and walk again, I was within about 20 metres of the top and there was no way I was baling out that close! I also sneakily knew I’d probably be able to gasp a breather at the top if J was moving slower than I was up the hill. J made it up about 2/3’s of the way – and this is a biiiiiig hill so that’s a great achievement! She’s been enjoying the odd hill training session but I haven’t got her persuaded to do the Blackhill ParkRun yet…who needs hill training sessions in Consett?! It’s difficult to get a training session in that doesn’t involve at least one somewhere!!!

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I took this session really really slow – so slow in fact that I set up the blog page between sets… I did my first attempt at the walk-the-plank chin-ups on Saturday, and really knew about it by the time Monday and Tuesday had swung round! Not my because of my shoulders or arms – my abs were killing me! If I keep this up I’ll just need to do some oblique sit-ups to work on the side and lower abs, the chin-ups are taking care of the top and central muscles! They really made their presence known every time I laughed or coughed. I’ve read on weight-lifting sites and in books that if you’re shifting heavy weights (and I guess shifting me counts as that!), then the muscle build and metabolism gain last about 48 hours – so you’re best to do a work-out every other day to have sufficient recovery and growth time, so ideally I should have been hanging off my bar on Monday or Tuesday, but my abs just couldn’t face it on Monday, and I opted for going out with Run England on Tuesday instead as I haven’t been out with them for ages.

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