30th April - 6th May 2012

M 8.05 miles recovery (7:07mm avge)

T  8.48 miles general aerobic (6:22mm avge)

W 12.48 miles, including 2X3.5 miles @5:20mm (5:55mm avge)

T 15.07 progressive (6:32mm avge) am, 4.16 miles recovery (7:22mm avge)pm

F 8.27 miles general aerobic, including 8X100m Strides (6:27mm avge)

S  6.62 miles recovery (7:!2mm avge)

S 22.26 miles including 3X5M @ 5:36mm avge (5:55mm avge)

Total:85.36 miles (6:25mm avge)

This was the first week of two of normal training that I'm trying to squeeze in before reducing down again for Edinburgh in three weeks time. And I have to say it went rather well. It could be because I'm relatively fresh because of my taper for London but it is always nice to have some confidence boosting sessions.

Tuesday was the first session for a while and it felt great to be running quickly again. I think I mentioned last week that I wanted to focus a bit more on tempo/lactate threshold type running in this mini build up to Edinburgh than VO2max stuff which I had been doing a reasonable amount of prior to London as I need to ‘re-bake the cake’ a bit. I have to say I was a little scared about this session and was relieved on the first 3.5 mile interval that the pace felt very manageable, indeed I had been expecting closer to 5:25s than 5:20s. What would the second interval hold? Well as you can see from above it was virtually identical, in fact a whole 3 seconds quicker and although the heart rate was rising it was definitely at the right effort level across the session. So that was nice.

Wednesday was a progressive run into work which I took a little easier averaging 6:32 per mile as I wanted to ensure I didn’t push into the realms of overreaching which may have been to blame for me picking up the colds back in March and prior to London.

And then to today's run which was a mighty session of 22 miles with three 5 mile efforts at Marathon Pace with a mile easy between the efforts. The plan with this was simply to get a lot of MP miles into the legs but without the stress of doing them all in one go. Having seen some friends' results at London it is clear that 2:30 will not be an easy mark to break and so if anything it gave me a bit of a wake up call to try to run more on the comfortable side with a view to hopefully picking up the pace towards the end of the second half at Edinburgh and perhaps sneaking under 2:29 if everything goes well and I race well. Anyway, today's run was another great confidence booster; the first effort felt very good indeed as did the second, it was only in the third that the legs were tiring a little bit but aerobically I was well in control and it was nice to see the pace increase a little throughout the workbouts. Full details are below.

All in all, this week couldn't have gone much better but I do need to get back to regular stretching and core work as I felt this was really starting to help a few weeks ago.