Blue Runnings

My marathon attempt at Kielder last week did not go quite according to plan due to my poor clothing choices in rather wet, windy and cold weather, but I genuinely felt as I made my way round the lake that I had it in me to finish. Even when I decided to pull out, it wasn’t because my legs couldn’t keep going.

I’ve spent three months ‘training’ for the marathon distance, and to be honest haven’t really enjoyed the latter half of it, so having determined that I probably wouldn’t be putting myself through it again anytime soon I decided I wanted to make one more try at the distance, and try going from Prudhoe to Newcastle Quayside and back – a flat route where realistically the distance was the only challenge.

The weather was once again rather soggy; drizzle forecast for the whole afternoon but fortunately not as wet and windy as Kielder had been.

I’d decided to try something slightly different to what I normally do for this one – I normally get as far as I can in one go, then interval at no particular time or distance after that depending on legs and terrain. This time I decided I’d try for steady; intervals from the start of 5 mins jogging and 2 mins walking in the hope that as I got more miles in, my jog speed would be maintained rather than slowing down as it normally does.

My personal trainer and faithful companion J was braving the ikky weather to accompany me and time-keep and generally chatter me round, for which I was very grateful!

We set off steady enough, heading down to Wylam and past Newburn without incidence or really notice, which was good as last time I did the run past Wylam and towards Newburn on an 8 mile run 2-3 weeks ago, I had to really fight to get that far. We followed the Hadrian’s Wall walk from Newburn towards the Quayside, coming down through an industrial estate including a Warburton’s factory neither of us knew was there (I can at least be excused not being a local by birth, but J seemed most put out at not having known in advance all the things there were to know!).

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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.

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.

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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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.

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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