Craig Batterham writes:
I’m a few weeks in and a few blogs down and realise I haven’t said very much about the actual training I’m doing. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, London is really only the first in my target to run all the majors, so as a minimum this is a three year journey if I can manage to run one every spring and autumn. It was the fact that this was a very long term plan that was one of the main drivers for me to look at 1-2-1 coaching with Jenny Bushell. I’d heard a lot of personal recommendations from other Eagles who had worked with her and met with success. There was also the small matter of those races I had already booked and some of the targets I had around Christmas and New Year where the plan would need to be adaptable and I doubted my own ability to manage that process. For sure joining a coach led group or following a plan from a book or website was not going to fit for me.
It was during a conversation one night on a recent club run with Steve Santos, who is also training for London, comparing our different plans it dawned on me that I actually find not knowing what I am going to be doing weeks or months in advance much less daunting, and having the different sessions communicated in small blocks on Training Peaks makes them more digestible, to a point where I am now just looking at what’s coming in the next 3-4 days. I know long runs are coming, I have booked onto the Kingston Spring Raceday 16 and the Richmond Riverside 20 and I’m sure I will see a lot of Eagles at both of them. For now though I just need to focus on the upcoming few days. As I write this I know what coming for the next three days but after that I’ve not really checked, and I like it that way.
Strength and conditioning has become a regular part of the weekly training but, for now, I’m not going to include anything about it here.
So I’m three weeks in, what have the training looked like so far? Almost all of the runs have been at an easy pace. A pace where I can hold a conversation using whole sentences, my breathing isn’t laboured at all and I feel like I could run forever. This is the pace that was the hardest for me to realise. The early days of running there was really one pace, forward. If that involves being in a race with other people it was as fast as the person in front if I could keep up. Right at the start my only real pace was as fast as my legs and lungs could take me. Then running so many races I learnt the difference between my 5k and 10k paces, eventually my HM pace. But finding that slow easy pace was hard, holding back, actively slowing down. That took a long time understanding what it felt like. This is helping me build aerobic fitness and stamina, my ability to go further for longer which will certainly come in useful for London.So this makes up the majority of my training right now, even at the Runthrough races I am so fond of. Slow and steady gets the flapjack.
Every Monday is club run, something I wanted to get Jenny to work into the plan all the way through. Two choices of distance with the added options of running to or from the meeting point for extra distance, all at the easy pace. Then there are the hills and interval sessions which a quite varied at the moment and some which have felt quite light so we have agreed to increase the load of some of these a bit for future sessions. Hills have been done at West Walk so far, sometimes joining the Eagles with others run solo. The intervals are either run at Osterley track if they are 800 or less but some laps of a park if the reps are 1k or more. It’s also been the first time I have tried fartlek and must say that has been the sessions I have enjoyed the most, especially when the track is empty and it’s just me and the wind. Unless that wind is strong, then the home straight becomes a real battle.
Then I guess there should be long runs, but right now they aren’t that long. The first week was my 10k race with a little warm up. Week two was a 16k run out to Hammersmith along the river which I cut a little short when I got to a coffee stop close to home and the coffee was far more enticing that running local laps or zig zagging around the local area to make up the distance. To cap off week three I ran the Farnborough Half Marathon, my second time running the event. I signed up last year as the first in my plan to run one HM every month of ‘22 and it’s where I set my PB so the plan this time was to break that and run a sub-2 half for the first time. This didn’t happen. At mile nine I just hit a wall, I’d been keeping pace with the sun-2 pack the whole way but there came a point where I just ran out of steam. I don’t think I had been taking on enough fuel along the way. I was using Tailwind in the water I was carrying and even while I was running I was having doubts about if I was sipping it often enough.
The biggest thing, in the literal and metaphorical sense, that’s wrong with my running and races at the moment is diet. That’s not in a good place at the moment and will form a whole other blog. For this race though I’m around 8kg heavier than the last time I ran it and this needs a lot more focus from me now.
So, all my A races have been and gone. Jenny did a great job of working these into my plan but now there is only one focus.
London.
