Week 2 of 20 Weeks to Sub 2:20?

M 9 miles (6:44mm), 4 miles (7:13mm)

T 6 miles (6:58mm)

W 11 miles including Askern 10k (33:05, 2^nd place)

T 7 miles (7:05mm), 5 miles (7:08mm)

F 7.5 miles (6:22mm)

S 10 miles including 5X[2:30(90s), 30s(90s)] – (6:14mm)

S 15 miles (6:27mm)

Total 75.9 miles (6:38mm)

This week I had a race on Wednesday evening and I was feeling confident that I should be able to get close to or beat my PB of 32:05 which is pretty soft in comparison to my Half marathon and especially my Marathon best. It was to be the Askern 10k and having studied the entry list I noticed a chap called Andy Challenger would likely be a good target for me to race.

It was very windy during the mid-part of last week but I felt as it was a quick course I would be ok and should give a good account of myself. I felt great on my warm up and was really ready and up for it, although the warm up ended up being longer than I would have hoped (c3.5miles) given the start was delayed slightly due to a large number of late entries on the night. Despite that I thought I would be easily into the 31:xx territory! How wrong was I!?!? Anyway, we were finally off and I settle into a nice rhythm with Andy and a chap from Rotherham and the first couple of k’s tick along quite nicely and I feel ok. It wasn’t long after this that I started to struggle to hold onto Andy though and by 3k he had a gap that was to only grow until the finish. My legs just completely gave up! I just couldn’t go any quicker. It was then a real slog all the way to the finish. I know I was trying really hard but I just couldn’t move. There were some horror splits in the race (see link above) which couldn’t only have been down to the weather! My immediate reaction after the race was that I just found it bizarre that I felt really good in the build-up and just before the race but then there was nothing there once I got going. I questioned whether I had put in enough effort and looking back at the Heart Rate data it is consistent with a hard effort. Average HR was 188bpm vs 176-179bpm  for a marathon so I was definitely trying! It made me wonder whether I hadn’t fully recovered from London which may still be lingering in the legs, the fact that I hadn’t done any sustained tempo running since before London but generally I just found it interesting that it had all been a bit rubbish! My other thought was the fact that it was an evening race. I very rarely run in the evening, never mind run hard so perhaps I got my fueling/prep wrong throughout the day or my body was winding down for the evening rather than getting ready for a bit of a beasting! Whatever it was, maybe a combination of all of the above and the wind it has been shelved and can hopefully just go down as a blip which will end up having been a roughly target marathon pace run for Berlin!

The rest of the week was pretty good including a brilliant session on Saturday where I was, for me, absolutely flying. 5X[2:30 (90s), 30s(90s)]and the paces for the 2:30 reps were all  4:36-4:42 per mile and the 30s efforts in 4:06-4:20 per mile. I appreciate the Garmin may be a tad optimistic but I suspect they were all comfortably sub 5 minute mile pace. It gave me a bit of reassurance that Wednesday’s race really was just one of those crap runs. Hopefully there won’t be too many more of them but more like the Saturday one where I felt strong, controlled throughout.