Week 6 – 32.1 miles 🏃♂️ 17th Feb – 24th Feb
It’s half term week! So in addition to Wednesday Beginners I also supported the Thursday morning Beginners group. Last week I decided to move my Strength and Conditioning session to a Tuesday and this seems to have paid off as my body felt better and so Thursday was a 10 miler, first a solo run then beginners, then home and no back pain! ☺
For the first time in this training plan I feel good and confident about my running! So what could be better than going to the top of West walk as assistant coach and encourage others to run up hills. It was a gruelling, hard but great Mirka hill session, with star jumps at the top of each hill rep!
Sunday was the Brighton half marathon at MTP. It’s my 4th consecutive year running this event. I love it! MTP for me at my current VLM target is 10:08 per mile (p/m) and I ran an average of 10:09 p/m. So all in all a good week…no my best week. Mileage increased by 3.5 miles, just under 10%, which is the usual guide for most marathon plans.
Week 7 – 38.8 miles 🏃♂️ 25th Feb – 3rd March
The good news is I’m running without any back pain! ☺ I set of for the Monday Club run (day after Brighton Half) and feel good, I ran with a few Eagles then with a new eagle Simon Brooks. My claim to fame, for an old Eagle, was that I caught and passed Andy Guy! I later find he’s running to a 130 heart beat, so he was only running at walking pace for him!! But I feel good and ran a total of 8.3 miles @ 8:35 average pace… I’m happy.
If you recall or maybe if you stayed awake reading my last rambling blog, I switched my long core strength session to Tuesdays. I found stretching later in the week meant the weekend long run was painful around my lower back (L4/5). The change seems to have worked as by the weekend the back ache had gone.
Time to start long weekend runs and find running buddies, an easy thing to achieve when you’re an Eagle 🦅. I run 15 miles, with Trisha running 2 metres in front of me so I couldn’t get lost then we were joined by my running wives for the last 5 miles. Average pace 9:35 against a planned pace of 10:00! After a run of 12 miles or more I like to get out the next day for a short run to get the lactic acid moving! So Sunday was a short dash around the block (3 miles) making this my 5th week of increased mileage and on track. The plan is 57 days from completion.
David Carlin 🏃♂️🍊🦅
