Week 6: 23rd - 29th January

M  7.18 miles recovery (7:27mm avge)
T  10.08 miles general aerobic, including 10X100m strides (6:35mm avge)
W  13.21 progressive (6:25mm avge)
T  6.04 miles recovery (7:15mm avge)
F  10.05 miles general aerobic (6:35mm avge)
S  6.00 miles recovery (7:15mm avge)
S  16.09 miles progressive (6:18mm avge)

Total 68.65 miles (6:42 mm avge)

Well this week was billed as a cut back week and indeed it was from the perspective of total miles and the pace and effort of the runs. With the exception of the strides in Tuesday's run there was nothing at a pace quicker than marathon effort. Having said all this, strangely this was the week where I had three fairly uncomfortable runs!

The schedule that I am following is from Pfitzinger & Douglas' Advanced Marathoning second addition. It's the 70 - 85 miles per week one in case you were wondering. Now as I have mentioned in previous blogs the book calls for lots of flexibility and core training which I am doing quite consistently and feel like I'm starting to reap the rewards from this tedium. You may recall that last week I said I was going to try the strength work out, well this week I did with the intention of doing one session on Wednesday and then a second on Friday. Now let me tell you, I was looking at the exercises in the book thinking oh this'll be easy, cant even see myself building up a sweat. Especially the fact that I only need to have 4.5kgs on the dumbbells! How wrong could I be? I spent Thursday (I had a trip to Edinburgh with work so it meant an evening run), and Friday walking around feeling like I'd been hit by a bus!

The exercises consisted of squats, lunges, push ups, and all sorts of other things but I really thought I had a good understanding of the muscles in my body, but I definitely learnt of a few new ones that I didn't know existed until Thursday! I can guarantee that they will be of some use but I will stick to only one session per week until my body adapts to it. I wouldn't say the session affected my runs too much on Thursday, Friday and even Saturday but I certainly didn't feel as smooth as I had done in my running of late. Still, none of this is supposed to be easy. It wouldn't be worth doing otherwise.

A brief comment on Sunday's run which was lovely and felt nice to be running very smoothly again after the beasting the strength session had given my body. It was nice to increase the effort throughout the duration of the run finishing with some surprisingly nippy miles for the effort. This run turned out to average 1008 beats per mile which tells me it was aerobically very efficient. I couldn't bring myself to log it as a long run though because it was only 16 miles but that's fine because the point of this week was to let the legs recover a bit after the previous few weeks harder training. Job done. :-)

Now it's time to crack on with the next phase of training, which looks the most challenging. 84 miles in store for me this coming week, with some nice testing looking sessions.