Wednesday 16 November 2016

Ribble Valley 10k - Week 2 of 8

M 9 miles (7:22mm)
T 11 miles HA (6:33mm), 6.5 miles (7:52mm)
W 8 miles HA (6:45mm), 5 miles (7:31mm)
9 miles including 12X1min hills, 7 miles (7:58mm)
F 10.5 miles (6:48m), 6 miles (7:30mm)
S 8 miles HA (6:52mm), 5 miles (7:50mm)
15.5miles including 4X15mins (5:59mm)

Total 100 miles (6:59mm)
Aerobic efficiency 1024 beats per mile
Weight 143.9lbs Vs 142.8lbs
Body Fat 10.65% (15.32lbs) Vs 11.18% (15.96lbs)
Lean Body Mass 84.75% (121.96lbs) Vs 84.38% (120.5lbs)
Water 64.35%(92.60lbs) Vs 63.55% (90.75lbs)


A brief update for last week as I have been a little short on time!


On the whole, a pleasing week which has seen me get back into triple figures mileage wise and a couple of decent sessions. I did a hill session of 12X1mins on the treadmill on Thursday. Having not done a hill session on the treadmill before I thought a 6% incline would be good and started off at 16kph (c6:00mm) with 90s recovery at 10kph at 0% incline. It became clear that these perhaps weren't hard enough so for 7-9 I upped the pace to 17kph and for 10-12 I upped it again to 18kph. this left me nicely tired at the end. I think it may be a struggle to run a full 12 at the moment at 18kph at 6% incline but that is the plan over the coming weeks. Alternatively next time I do it I may try and go at 18kph but reduce the incline to say 4 or 5%.


The second session was a marathon type session on Sunday of 4X15mins. I find these types of sessions do bring me on quite quickly and I enjoy long sustained effort running, which probably has something to do with me being a marathoner! The paces of the 15 minute efforts came out around 5:30s but they did feel hard and somewhat above current Marathon Pace.


I have been experimenting the past couple of weeks with a relatively low carb diet in the hope of shedding a bit of fat to get down towards the body composition I was pre-Toronto. The result has been that although my overall weight has gone up a touch my body composition has improved with body fat reducing, lean body mass and water increasing. That said I have to admit training in a low carb way has proven to be difficult. Even though I upped the quantity of carbs on the days before this week's sessions, my easy and moderate running has felt noticeably harder and this is reflected in a low aerobic efficiency which has dropped off significantly since my race a few weeks ago. While this may be down to a slight drop in fitness my feeling is that the majority of it is likely to be down to 'training low'. So this coming week I will move to a more typical diet with c50% of calories coming from carbs and see what happens!

3 comments:

  1. Jason - first up, congrats on the England call up, you must be very proud! And great race, in spite of the conditions.

    Just wanted to ask - when you are looking at aerobic efficiency, do you take all miles including warm ups and warm downs into consideration? My intuition says that counting warm ups may skew overall figures for the week, with the time it takes for your HR to 'wake up' and find its rhythm, and if you run 12x one week vs 6x another (random numbers), then that's twice as many chances for your WU/WD to skew overall figures. OR.... I could be chatting out of my backside :)

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  2. Hi John,

    Thanks for your comment. I include all miles, my feeling is quite opposite to yours in that the more data the better. Of course I recognise that early miles of a run you may be running at a more efficient rate as it can take a while for your HR to rise. But all things considered I'm doing similar stuff every week (two or three hard runs, the rest moderate or easy and normally around 10 runs a week).

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  3. Ah that's a good point you make - if you're doing similar stuff and running consistently each week, then the effect should be minimal. Ok great, thanks for the comment!

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