Craig Batterham writes:
It’s that time of year when you see a runner out on the streets and in the parks and know exactly where they are working towards in the spring. If it’s not London then it’ll be another 26.2 miles somewhere. By the time this is published some people will be five weeks into their plan, some three weeks, for me I guess it’s one week. I’ve met and talked to a number of runners now at the beginning of their plans and done the comparisons that we all do, trying to assess if the
one they are on is better or worse. The first few weeks of my plan landed in Training Peaks from Jennyand I am very happy with it considering some of the additional goals I have set and the request to try to keep Monday Club runs and as many Runthrough races in there as possible.
When I started working with Jenny last year it was a three year cycle in my head and London was going to be the first because that’s where it fitted best into my plans. The only other choices for a spring marathon for me were Tokyo or Boston. Neither of those are going to happen in 2023 for me. To help make Jenny’s coaching a little harder I also wanted to make
some PB attempts at three different distances in December and January that would be roughly 12 months after setting each one previously. The 5k attempt was just before Christmas in Battersea and I came very close but didn’t get the cigar (had to settle for a flapjack instead). It was a year’s best though so still managed to finish on a high. There was another Eagle there that night who smashed their PB with a sub-20 5k, fantastic work Vic! Awesome work.
The 10k attempt was this weekend in Victoria Park. Last January I set a time of 54:16, narrowly missing my PB by four seconds. For the rest of last year I only really managed to get slightly injured and progressively slower. This Sunday was my chance to have a go at beating my times before I become fully focused on the marathon. But that wasn’t to be the case. I finished with a time of 54:49. There are so many reasons why I didn’t make it but it really just boils down to losing the mental battle somewhere around the 5k mark and you can see this if you look at my pacing on Strava which had been a series of negative splits up to that point. I don’t want to go into this here, I really want to do another post that focuses on the mental strength side of running in the near future.
There is one more race to go before the only thing on the road ahead of me is marathon training, a half marathon around Farnborough. Billed as the first HM of the year and starting below the skeletal remains of an old airship hanger it is where I first wore the Eagles shirt in a race and because of that met Dick Overton. Back then things had been going great but turned out to be the crest of the new runner wave I was riding. I picked up a niggle in the hip which slowed me around 16k into the run and I lost the pace group I’d been tailing all the way through. Because of how ‘22 turned out Farnborough still ended up as my PB for the year so that’s why I’m heading back there.
Something totally different that’s slowly becoming part of my training is strength work in the gym. Still working on building that habit where it just becomes something I do without much thought, like running has become. It’s just what I do. I swapped from a membership at one of the cheap subscription gyms as they are always too busy for me in the day. It used to work back before I started running when I’d be in there at 4am. At that time of day it was me and one other, so no having to wait for kit to become available, much nicer. I took the plunge this year and decided if I was going to be serious about the goals over the next few years it needed a step change. So I’ve joined a health club and got myself a personal trainer to help devise sets of exercises that fit into the days where Jenny prescribed ‘Strength’ on Training Peaks. I’m trying to get at least one session of prehab exercises in with maybe a second session of picking stuff up and putting it down again. I should really find time to use their other stuff as well, I’m paying enough for it!