Blue Runnings

Marathon Training – Week 4

by Sarah J.

I’ve had a bit more success hitting my workouts this week, even if I’ve had to swap a few days around to do it. I’ve managed to do a core training session and a home workout, even though work once again stopped me getting to the gym, and I’ve gotten 3 running sessions in – from 3 miles at Blackhill Parkrun right up to my long run of the week, 14 miles in high winds.

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All the work-related sabotage of my plans is starting to tell on my monthly mileage total, I’ve not missed a long run but I was really hoping to hit 100 miles this month for the first time ever, and while it’s achievable still, if I miss anything it’s going to be very out of reach rather than within a mile or two’s grasp.

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P reminded me that I need to be careful I don’t do too much just to hit some arbitrary target I’ve set myself, there’s always next month, and he’s right – I would be more gutted if I hurt myself trying to do too much on Tuesday’s run trying to hit it, and then was 20 miles off because I missed my training session and my long run, than if I was 1-2 miles off but ready to tackle next month’s training in a fit shape. I’m going to play it by ear and see how I feel but I’m still hoping to scrape through to the big 1-0-0.

I was feeling very stiff on Monday after my last long run, thanks to my rest day being a little too restful with an all-day meeting, so I was moving so little I stiffened right up! By Wednesday I was feeling more myself again, but knew that trying to run 11 miles off the cuff was going to be stupid so I decided to go for the more realistic target of 8 miles along the river, with J accompanying me on her bike as distraction and safety guardian – lone running in the dark in areas with no street-lights and few people is silly. I felt pretty ok with this, but I would have struggled had the terrain been any tougher than flat or if I’d had to go much further. A small amount of rubbing on my right arch, presumably from some squelchy mud or something but escaped unscathed apart from that 🙂

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Marathon Training – Week 3

by Sarah J.

I’ve remembered why I so rarely plan anything. Life keeps getting in the way. Another week where I have completely failed to hit even 50% of what I was going for! Last week it was a cold bug which I was just about shifting, this week it was work, which went bang rather spectacularly away from plan on the machine shut and meant I spent two days running around the blinking thing climbing up and down and over all the things. By the time we actually got the thing running (briefly) on Thursday afternoon and having slept badly the night before there was not much left in the tank by the time I got home! That put Thursday’s gym session out the window, and to be honest I’d done enough across the two days I didn’t feel I’d missed it! Early bed, disturbed by a work phonecall at 10pm so I knew things were not going well, and I was probably not much use for anything on Friday.

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I had at least started the week well; N & I tried out the hill at Shotley Bridge which I’ve been thinking of adding onto the end of my new Leadgate hills route to bring it up to 6M and an extra hill; turns out it’s a savage one! I think the addition of this one will also depend on what time of day I’m doing the Leadgate one – access to the bottom of the hill is by a non-street-lit and non-pavemented road which isn’t really what you want to be doing in the dark as a pedestrian.

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After that it went a bit off-piste…thanks work…Friday and Saturday were both rest days, and I really needed them both and some decent sleep. P and I were booked in to a star-gazing talk on Saturday afternoon so I was intending to swap Saturday and Sunday and do Blackhill Parkrun on Saturday morning, except I was away with the fairies! I really enjoyed the star-gazing talk and by the time we’d got home after our pub dinner and gone to bed obscenely early for a couple in their twenties on a Saturday night, I was feeling chilled out and vaguely human again. Ready to give my long run on Sunday a good shot anyway.

I’ve been getting very worried about the long runs and not hitting the distances I feel I need to be to have a decent shot at getting round in one piece in March, so I really needed a morale booster and a bit of self-confidence building back up again. I was originally going to park somewhere down the Derwent walk, run in the uphill direction towards Ebchester and Shotley Bridge to get the hills out the way while I was vaguely fresh, and then head back down again having turned around at some arbitrary point. I decided I’d give myself a bit of a break and try doing the full distance in the downhill direction and get P to pick me up wherever I ended up. I’d mapped out on MapMyRun that it was 10 miles to Blaydon, and if I wanted to hit the full half marathon as a minimum I needed to get to Newburn Leisure Centre. If possible I wanted to hit 14 miles and really put the half-marathon wall to bed. I’d only actually run a half-marathon twice, both in race conditions and not since September.

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Marathon Training – Week 2

by Sarah J.

Ok, week 2 complete, slightly less according to plan than I was hoping but that throat tickle I had last week turned into a throat infection and now a cold which has been a big contributor in my not hitting the mileage I was after.

I’ve put a copy of my marathon training plan on the menu sidebar so you can see what my intended activity for each day was, and I’m also tracking how well I’m sticking to it. This week I’ve unfortunately been a not-insignificant 9 miles shorter scattered across 3 different runs (click on pic to see bigger).

I lost 3.5 miles off Tuesday’s run – I was intending to go out with Run England and got home from work late, which made it easier by the time we’d had dinner to wimp out because of the rain. The other 1.5 and 4 miles were directly related to my cold and while I’m a little disappointed, I have to make my health over the next few weeks a higher priority than pushing myself way too far for one day’s figures, so I’m trying to focus more on the fact I went out at all and achieved the mileage I did despite my throat and headcold, rather than having made the runs for this weekend shorter. A bit of give and take needed to keep me going.

I did my first training session of the year which was…interesting. It was a new format compared with the hill training and intervals I’ve done before; we were doing 7x 3 mins effort, with 1.5 mins recovery between each set, and the idea is that you should pace yourself to be able to do about the same distance in the last set as you did in the first. I failed miserably at this, setting off far too fast in my first two sets (<9min/miles) and as a result feeling my leg twinge in set 5, walking set 6 and just jogging set 7 (which by that point even that felt like hard effort!). Back to the drawing board with that one. Still, I know for next time! We’ll be doing that one again over the next few weeks.

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On the plus side, I have finally figured out how to use the ‘lap’ button on my watch! Not actually complicated but I have previously worried if I pushed the wrong button I’d lose all my route data or something.

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Marathon Training – Week 1

by Sarah J.

This week has been a bit of a mixed bag in terms of exercise sessions, but I think it’s been the most I’ve done in a long time!

Casual runs: 2 miles, 2.5 miles, 4.5 miles of hilly doom & 6 miles flat

Long run: 11.5 miles

Workouts: Core session x2 & home workout x 25 mins

This is the first week I’ve tried following any sort of real allocated daily plan rather than just seeing what I feel like doing depending on the weather or how much I can be faffed with. The thing I’m trying to keep in mind is that this is new to me and I’m going from occasional pootling about as I have been before Christmas, to 5 sessions a week at varying intensities and I’m not sure as of yet how well my body’s going to take the step up in training.

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I tried testing a new core strength workout on Wednesday and followed it up immediately with a workout without the core exercises, but quite a lot of arm exercises; I had sore deltoids and abs for days afterwards – laughing really hurt – so being back to normal this morning, I tried just the core workout but skipped one of the planks (there are 3) and did slightly fewer sit-ups. I figure I can build up to doing the full thing, and I’d rather do slightly less in the short term and be able to move than be unable to do anything for my first gym session on Thursday (it’s booked! No getting out of it!).

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Endings and Beginnings

by Sarah J.

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I’m not usually one for new resolutions; every new second, minute, day, week, month is an opportunity to make a new start for yourself so I’ve never really been particularly bothered about January the 1st coming round again, I certainly don’t really wait for it before doing anything. This year however I find myself thinking about what I want to do for myself in the year going forward. Even just within the fitness part of my life, 2015 has been a year of many firsts for me and I find myself wondering what 2016 will bring and where I’ll be and what I will have done this time next year. How much fitter will I be or how much further will I have travelled and what new things will I have seen?

Before I get too hung up in leaping forward, I’d like to briefly take stock of where I’ve been and what I’ve achieved this year. Everyone always has goals of where they want to be, and they’re always faster, or further, or fitter than where they are now – regardless of what they were 5 minutes ago or where they’ve come from. I am exactly the same, but I am also really proud of how where I am now – even with a somewhat haphazard approach to training and a more turn-up-and-see approach than a strategic one to races.

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Loftus Poultry Run

by Sarah J.

I’ve been making an effort not to spend my entire paycheck on race entries, can you tell by my suddenly rather gapped entries?! Out of practice with this blogging malarky…late for this one too! C+, must do better.

My last race of the year was the Loftus Poultry Run, a first for me but one I’ve heard of before – I have lived in Marske and Stockton before I started running and it has a degree of notoriety! Hills, hills, hills… 5 up, 3 down. In keeping with its name, all the category prizes are exactly that – chickens, geese and turkeys, all ready to cook for Christmas dinner! A large proportion of runners go in festive fancy dress for the end of the year so it was time to drag out the tinsel and join them. I think the closest I’ve come to a fancy-dress run is the Mo-Run, and the most I’ve worn for that is a viking hat and big furry moustache and beard, or my tutu skirt and headress for the GNR – I don’t tend to go for a full outfit for fear of getting too hot or rubbing in places I don’t want to think about! (Once chaffed, twice very shy indeed!!!) How do we get round it? Hat, gloves, stockings, tail, ears – we go as the Cat in the Hat with a tinsel twist 🙂

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‘Twas a bright and sunny day in Loftus, but it was also blowing a gale with many-mph winds so my poor hat tinsel started dewinding from my hat past about 400 yards, and by the end of the race was devoid of stars and wrapped round my neck like green sparkly barbed wire with only tiny barbs.

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North-East Harrier League – Aykley Heads

by Sarah J.

It was a cold and blustery day in the North-East. Snow had fallen that night and the temperature was close to zero. The wind was howling past the windows and the running clubs of the North-East were donning their finest woolly hats, thermal layers and wellies to brave the perils of the Durham hilltops in winter’s first icy breath.

I picked up another Bounder on the way in, and we made it to Durham County Hall with only a minor detour finding the entrance to the carpark, and hiked up the hill to hunt out the Bounders tent. It was FREEZING at the top where the start and finish were – the only available shelter was in the tents themselves, which were full of bags and children munching goodies after their races, so the grown-ups shivered outside and refused to take their coats and extra trousers off for as long as possible! The women’s race start time crept up, so it was off with all non-running layers and head to the line. 10 mins later before the hooter sounded, we were all blue! Some people were actually in shorts and we saw one crop top! I don’t know how their legs were still attached…

Finally we were off! In a loop around the top of the hill – the wind! – before heading down and off onto the course proper. It wasn’t long before I forgot about the cold, I was warm enough in my capris, thermal and headband, and was busy concentrating on keeping steady and not turning an ankle or ending up on the floor, probably in front of well-placed camera (they always seem to know the slippy bits). I think someone must have been round the course with a hose and a herd of cows before we got there, as there is no way those paths got that muddy on their own! It was even worse by the second lap – there were nearly 400 runners just in the women’s senior and veteran group, so by the time they’d all gone round once it was very well churned up! The poor men’s class must have had a tough time of it – and they do three laps!

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The Sun Shines on Sunderland – Run 2 Remember

by Sarah J.

The morning of the Run 2 Remember race in Sunderland, this article came up on my facebook news feed. Reading it really helped bring into focus for me what the charities behind the Run 2 Remember series are working for and towards, and made me feel so incredibly lucky to still have the use of all my facilities. I haven’t really been following the Walk With the Wounded Tour of Britain, just had a general awareness that it was going on. The woman featured in the story has had most of her body rebuilt over the last few years, and then walked 1000 miles before being scheduled to have her leg amputated. That’s just the physical barriers she’s overcome. If that doesn’t make you grateful you’re able to swing yourself out of bed in the morning and sweep away all excuses for not doing something I really don’t know what will.

When I booked this race, it was to be my last 5k of the year and I was hoping for a shot at a pb – November race, should be nice and cold, flat course, good paths… A good plan except someone forgot to tell the weather what time of year it was, so it was 15-16’C and when running it felt like July, there were several long hills near the end, and I’d forgotten to take into account the fact it’s autumn so all those lovely tarmac paths were covered in wet leaves. Fun times ahead!

The course followed what I believe is the Sunderland parkrun route and it was very pretty and less hilly than the Blackhill one! J and I completely melted on the way round but we made it – down the hill, twice round the lake (fortunately a small lake as I don’t do well with laps!), along the field and then up…and more up…and up some more to the finish line! We raided the burger van for sausage rolls with onions because we’d totally earned them. We got a pretty funky medal and a goody bag filled with yummies, and for some reason low sodium salt in vast quantities…

I enjoyed this one 🙂 A good reason to get up on a Sunday morning – though personally I would have liked it about 10 degrees colder!

You can download the GPX data for this course from my Dropbox account by following the link below:

GPX data on Dropbox

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Gibside Fruit Bowl

by Sarah J.

Enough time has passed now that I feel able to talk about the trauma that was the Gibside Fruit Bowl race…the 19th annual race of the Blackhill Bounders at the National Trust’s Gibside estate. Ok, so it wasn’t bad enough to actually be traumatic, but it was very tough. I’m actually just really late posting because it’s taken me this long to have a working computer – I fried my PC and my netbook at the same time, touchscreens are the bane of my life so I wasn’t writing this on my tablet, and I’ve only just managed to get one of them running again – unfortunately the PC’s going to need a new power supply and I haven’t figured out which one I need yet. I will.

Back to the race! I’ve run here before once or twice for the Great Run Local route, which is a 5k from the walled garden up to the monument and round through the woods, past the play area and back to the house. I remember hearing one of the GRL organisers saying once that they’d tried running it in reverse just to see if they could add some variety to it by sometimes running the route in the other direction, except he said it wasn’t really possible as some of the hills in that direction were too steep and long to really run up. A special prize for guessing which way the Fruit Bowl route went….

Obviously, being more than twice the distance, it covered rather more than just the GRL route – and of course, the other bits were not going to be nice easy bits. It turned out to actually be a hybrid of the GRL route, the National Trust Night Run course I did last February, and some random extra steep hills that they’d thrown in for good measure. Definitely the toughest 10k course I’ve done, and actually probably the toughest run I’ve ever done – Gelt Gladiator had nothing on this one!

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Hellhole 10k

by Sarah J.

It’s that time of year again, the weather is cooling down nicely and we’re all dreaming of hot soups and stews, autumn colours, warm fuzzy jumpers and big coats… And plague. For the human respiratory system for some reason is fine in most temperature conditions, but heaven forbid it has to cope with any sort of change. Phlegm for you Sir, lots of it, and maybe a headache and swollen glands. A human body in full immune response doesn’t do subtle or attractive!

I skipped park run on Saturday, particularly knowing I was booked in for Hellhole on Sunday, and decided I’d play it by ear on Sunday morning before deciding whether I was going or not. At this point I was still at the sore throat level, I have since levelled up and am now a full-blown (ha-ha) snothead boss! Lucky me huh. Obviously I did decide to run it, or we wouldn’t even be here, but decided I’d take it slow, wrap up, walk if I needed to and just get round. First time since last winter I’ve had ye olde thermal top on! I had my running lights on earlier in the week too, the dark nights are fast approaching!

Anyway, nice and snug I was – thermal for my chest, buff for my neck, soothers in belt pouch, trail shoes on, ready to go! I’ve not done Hellhole before, nor been to Stanley – only driven through it so I didn’t really know what to except for this one, other than being slightly suspicious of anything called ‘multi-terrain’ and having resigned myself to hills.

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