I don’t really know what to write for this week to be honest, so I’m going to just ramble…may have my moaning minnie hat on a little bit!
I’ve had a bit of a mixed bag of runs this week; I went out with one of the work peoples who wanted to try running (something about getting a “beach bod” before he goes to the US) on Tuesday, turns out he’s a bit quicker than me so I’m booking him in as my speed trainer on Mondays once I get this monster run out the way! If my base-level fitness hadn’t improved so much lately I don’t think I’d have maintained the pace over the 2 miles (and 2 miles at that pace was more and faster than I was intending after Sunday’s 20! I just wanted a leg-loosener!). It’s actually within 5 seconds of my fastest pace, which I think was set on a 5k around the village so pretty happy with that.. I enjoyed it but I think I’ll leave the speed training for a few weeks! Then I shall learn how to become a speed ninja…
I’ve really missed just doing my ‘junk runs’ and just getting out when I feel like it to clear my head and pound the trails. I went out for one on Thursday on the hill route round Leadgate. I’ve only tried this twice before but it’s a nice little 4 mile loop local to me and I’ve enjoyed it before, so I was looking forward to heading out on this one. N came with me and we left at a pretty normal pace for me, but I wasn’t really feeling it – I actually felt slightly sick part-way round and had slowed riiiight down coming up the last hill (to be fair, it’s a pretty big hill). Being tired after four miles on anything but a cross-country course has been becoming pretty unusual for me as my fitness improves, and the warning alarms should really have been going off at this point. I took Friday off work with how long the week felt, and actually slept 3 hours Friday afternoon I was that tired.
For some reason I didn’t connect my need to sleep all hours and heavy legs while running with the fact I was doing a long run on Saturday, and just assumed I would pootle off as I normally do for the half marathon at Bamburgh Castle by Endurance Life. I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while, and was expecting to cope with it easily having run 4 runs longer than the half marathon distance (2 x 14M, 1 x 15.5M, 1 x 20M) and one only two miles short (11M) this year already. That’s in 9 weeks. I’ll just let that sink in a minute. For someone who hadn’t done much more than a 10k for 3 months before Christmas that’s huge, and for some reason I just decided I would be absolutely fine doing another one. Body says otherwise. This is the toughest race I’ve ever done – which considering it’s flattish and not an unfamiliar distance is not something I was expecting to say. Rather than repeat everything here, I’m going to direct you to my dedicated Bamburgh race report if you want to read all the minutiae. However long it took me to get there, and however hard I found it, I crossed that finish line and I’m taking that as a win.
Blue Runnings 