I did it, yay. It looked a bit ropey after EUOC’s Big Weekend as I came away from it with a calf niggle. Some gentle persuasion from Heather helped me over that particular hurdle.
This month has left me quite tired, but in a good way. I feel like my body is much happier to have done some training rather than trying to compete on very little. As you can see from the image above (or my actual log) the last 31 days I’ve run over 280km and trained for a total of nearly 35 hours. This is more than I’ve ever done in a month (well, ok, apart from July 2009 but that was mostly cycling to work and a one off adventure race) and it will have paved the way for a much more consistent year which was always the ultimate goal. I was a little worried I was going to end up doing too much but I think I’m ok with what I’ve done. Some of the big boys do a hell of a lot more but I’ll be happy if I can do a consistent set of decent training.
I don’t think it is worth trying to keep up running every day as forcing myself out at 10pm a couple of times after a long day of non-running isn’t really helpful, that time will be better used to rest. What I will do is stick to my routine, leaving my bag at work to go to intervals on a Tuesday night then jogging in on Wednesday morning has worked very well (even with a circuits session on Wed evening!) as has running home from work if I don’t have any other session on. The one thing I need to add is a hill rep session, sorely lacking at the moment and will help my speed in terrain tremendously.
My aims for the year, I hear you ask? I’d like to do well at the JK on home turf and the Scottish Champs (i.e. no break down this year) as well as trying to attend all the local-ish Urban races as they’re ace. I also want to do some road running, a decent half marathon time as well as consistent 5km time improvement at the Parkrun event.
