Super Loopy

I am more than halfway through my training plan for the Rotterdam Marathon and this week passed the two hundred kilometre mark for running this month. Next month’s total distance will likely be higher than that, with the added bonus of a race thrown in. March will be a big month.

This has been a slight down week in terms of total distance run, but that is more due to the fact that I have been away for the weekend, so my usual weekend long run did not take place. I had to be inventive to get in a long run at all.

I have written many times before about how, for me, running is an enjoyable hobby, and as such, it has to take its place alongside all of the other things which go on in my life – work, family, etc. This week I could not run on Tuesday due to work commitments so I ran on Monday instead. As I mentioned I could not run long this weekend as I was away for a few days, so I ran long on Thursday. It is about balance and fitting things in, though I did also manage to do a run I had never done before.

“a critical part”

Getting a long run each week is a critical part of my marathon schedule. I think it is ok to miss out other runs, but I really try and ensure the long run happens, and so far I have not missed one out. This week was due to be eighteen miles, one of the longest runs of the whole programme, but that was not going to be possible. Instead I began to formulate a plan where I could do a long run on Thursday night, working it in with my JogScotland group, where I was leading the five and a half mile group.

My initial plan was to head out for about an hour beforehand, which would get me around six miles, then do the group, then finish off with another couple of mile to take me up to half marathon distance. I am due to run half marathon distance next weekend, so I thought I swap the runs around, doing a half this week and then the eighteen next weekend.

But then a work call came in and I was not going to be able to get out for the hour beforehand. The plan then changed to do a couple of miles first with friends, then do the group, then run about the same distance again to get the miles in. I had to formulate a route where that would work and I came up with a really rather loopy course, where, even though I would run half marathon distance, the furthest away I would be from my house was only around two and a half miles.

The route I came up with

Now you might notice that I actually ran more than fourteen miles, rather than just the thirteen point one needed for the half distance. For part of the route, I paused my watch in error so I got so annoyed with myself, I ran the extra mile. The run was not fast, that was not the point, what was much more the point was putting myself through the mental test of running the last six or so miles on my own having had company for the first part of the run. Being mentally strong is such a big part of distance running for me, that this was a good test to get through.

The eighteen mile run will now be the focus of next weekend. I could, of course, just revert to the plan and do the half distance, but I want to tick off this distance, getting past it as another stepping stone to the start line.

“entirely uphill!”

The reason I could not run long this weekend was that I was away in Dundee. Now I have run there a few times – in fact doing the half there last summer – but where I had never run was over the Tay Bridge, the structure which links the city to Fife, running for around a mile and a half across the River Tay. Once I managed to figure out how to get onto the walkway which sits between the traffic going over the bridge it was pretty straightforward, even if the route to Fife was entirely uphill! It did mean, however, that the route back was downhill, even if it was into quite a chilly breeze, but it was worth it for the lovely morning views, both of Fife and the city, and the symmetrical elevation map which I got for doing it!

The rest of my running during last week was very standard – hill reps one night, hilly run another night – and I am hoping that this week I will be able to get back to my usual routine. Rest days on Monday and Friday, running Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, long run Saturday, recovery run on Sunday. And that is what I need to continue doing for the next seven weeks.

In two weeks time, there is the Inverness Half Marathon and it will be great to have a race to break up the long weekend run routine. In reality though, it is just another distance to tick off. I am approaching the part of training now where it is really serious, every weekend is just one long run after another, building all the way up to twenty miles or so in only four weeks time before tapering down for the race itself. I feel confident in myself that I can meet the challenges ahead, but I also know how hard this next stretch will be. Seven weeks to go.

Fresh

There are eight weeks to go until the Rotterdam Marathon. Eight more long runs in the programme and I am done. Now is the time to keep pushing on.

Last week’s struggles were a bit of a wake up call about the need to ensure I was fueling properly for my runs, even while trying to lose a little weight, and also about how hard the marathon journey is to get through. It was also a good reminder that one bad week does not ruin everything which has been done before.

Since my hill rep struggles, I have had a series of positive runs. A hilly half marathon with friends, a weekend run in Cardiff with a mate, a return to hill reps which was a total contrast to the week before, and the longest run I have done all year. This is what marathon training is about. Remembering that all of it is contributing to the ultimate goal of that twenty six point two mile course.

After the hill reps last week, and because I was going away for the weekend, I had arranged a half marathon run with friends Susan and Jeanette for the Friday morning. Susan often runs with her dog Scout and so he would join us for the first ten kilometres then we would head off for the second half of the route. What this meant, however, was that the second half would be quite a bit hillier than the first. After what had happened two nights before, this did not fill me with a great deal of confidence.

With Susan, Scout and Jeanette

This is where running with friends can play such a crucial part in running. While running alone is great – and is certainly something I have found to be really helpful in building mental resilience – running with a group is so important to help each other get through. And get through it we did. Another half ticked off. More hills and miles in the legs.

While I run quite often with Susan and Jeanette, the same cannot be said for my friend Rob, who lives down in North Wales. It was therefore great to meet up with him for a weekend away in Cardiff and while the purpose of the weekend was much more about drinking, watching the Scotland v Wales rugby and eating shedloads, it was great to go running with him and exploring a bit of the Welsh capital – and to clear our heads from the excesses of the night before!

It was also great to chat with him and get a different perspective on running, life and the various things we have both achieved in recent years. No one has a monopoly on good ideas, so it was so nice to see him in person and to share some valued time together. It was also good just to run somewhere else rather than around Aberdeen!!

“trying to avoid becoming stale”

That brings me on to another crucial point about training – trying to avoid becoming stale, or even bored, with the routes which I am running. It is very easy to run the same roads time and time again and this does very little to help you get through the hard parts of training. Sometimes it is unavoidable, of course, but it is something to consider. That was what prompted me to plan a bit of a different route for this weekend’s long run, which I will come back to.

After being in Cardiff, work rather intervened this week and meant I could not get to JogScotland on Tuesday – I went for a morning run instead – or Wednesday, so I arranged a run with another friend, Maxine, finishing with hill reps. The contrast between the previous week and this week could not have been more stark. This week was still tough – hill reps just are – but when I finished them I felt exhilarated rather than exhausted. This really felt like progress.

This week’s hill rep extravaganza

It is then about building on that progress and back to the long route plan. I deliberately chose a route which would take us out to a place where I had run only once before, and also one which was particularly hilly. Now you may think, “hang on, isn’t your marathon in Rotterdam and isn’t the Netherlands flat?”, and you would be quite right, but at this point in training I want to make the long runs hard and hilly, to build in extra resilience and to make any fitness gains which I can.

My friend Jeanette joined me again for the majority of the run – two other friends, Cara and Maxine joined me for the early miles – and together we ploughed up the hills which we faced and encouraged each other to get through the tough parts. Jeanette totally bossed it – me, not quite so much – but we got it done on what was a cold but beautiful morning to be out running, particularly when the route took us through the Bucksburn Valley area.

Jeanette and I with about five miles still to go

And when I say it was hilly, it was this hilly. More than one thousand feet of elevation hilly with a lovely final two miles uphill just for laughs at the finish. More than hilly enough for this week. If I run tomorrow, I think I will go somewhere flat.

While last week did not quite leave me in a pit of despair, it certainly knocked my spirits and that was why this week was so important. Important not to get too down about what had happened, as I said last week it is vital to remember runs like the one I had and learn from them, and important to recognise that while this week has been significantly better, nothing is done yet. Every week is just a stepping stone along the way.

Next week life will get in the way again and I do not think I will be able to do my long run at all, for various reasons, so that might prompt a bit of a rethink about the training plan. It is not about chasing missing miles if you cannot get them done, it is about adjusting and making the best of whatever can work in the circumstances. Let’s see how it pans out. Eight weeks to go.

Never Forget

It is easy to recall the great runs. The ones where you breeze along, feeling like you could run forever, feeling in tune with your body, your breathing, almost at one with nature. They may not happen very often but when they do they tend to stick; almost as if the running gods are giving you a sip of running nectar to keep you thirsty for more.

And then there are the runs which are truly horrible. The ones which you simply want to banish from your memory banks, never to be recalled again for fear that how you felt that day or that night will return to haunt you once again.

Well this week, I had a night of running which was straight out of a horror show, but if I am being honest, I want to hold onto how I felt that night. Why? In order to spur me on when things get very tough. I am not too sure why it happened – I have some theories which I will come back to later – but happen it did, and awful it was.

“lack of energy in my legs”

Wednesday night has become my night for doing a hill reps session with my local JogScotland group. It is always a tough session – hill reps just are – but the camaraderie and encouragement of the other runners always gets you through it. This week was different – not down to the lack of encouragement and support but more down to the total lack of any energy in my legs.

I had run down to the location, which was quite far away from my house this week, at about two and a half miles, and this was where my problems began. An almost entirely downhill run – even if it was mostly into what was quite a strong, gusty wind – should have been the ideal warm up for the session itself. But in reality, I felt pretty grim for most of this run. I could not settle my breathing – the wind did not help with that – and my legs felt very heavy. In fact my whole body felt pretty lethargic.

So much so, that by the time I got down to the location of the reps session and met up with the other runners, I already felt a bit dead. Plus I knew what I was in for, and then, of course, I also then had the monster two and a half mile climb back home to do afterwards.

“did nothing to improve how I was feeling”

After a short warm up, off we set, but even in the warm-up, before we began up the hill, I knew my legs just did not have anything in them. Still off we went, with most of the others sprinting off into the distance (this might sound hard to believe, but I also managed to get lost. Now quite how you get lost of hill reps is a bit of a mystery to me too, but lost I got), so I ended up running down and up another hill. Not once, but twice, but this was my own fault. As you can imagine this did nothing to improve how I was feeling. What was then the icing on the cake was I also realised I had managed to stop my watch by accident, so I ended up not knowing how long I had still to endure. All in all it was pretty grim.

I got to the end though, struggling through it, and of course, then faced the big test home. Now, this was entirely of my own choosing. I could have driven down. I could have accepted a lift back from one of the other runners (who did offer), but no, I had made my bed and now it was up to me to lie in it.

“I gritted my teeth”

I did run the first half mile or so with one others as he headed back to his car, then after that I was on my own. I crawled up that hill. I had resolved that I was not going to walk, but I am pretty sure that I was not doing much in the way of running. But I did keep going. I did not stop. Each junction or bus stop or crossing I passed was another bit of the test chalked off. Each road I passed was consigned to history. And as I approached the steepest part of the hill, I gritted my teeth and kept moving.

My legs might have had nothing in them, but my heart still had loads. My head still had loads. My lungs were burning, my breathing erratic, but my guts were fully intact. And it was guts which got me through it. Not technique, not the equipment I was wearing, nothing like that. What got me through it was sheer determination not to give in. This was resilience writ large.

“I want to remember”

And that is why the runs on Wednesday night are the ones which I want to remember. Not for how good it was but for how bad the whole thing was. How awful I felt. How empty my legs were. How much of a struggle it was to do any of it. But I did do it. I was not quick. It was not easy. It was not any of those things which you would want to look back at and sigh, “ahh, that was great”. It was the total opposite of that. But this is the whole point.

When you are taking part in a race, there will be times when it is tough, and in a marathon, it can be very tough indeed, and that is when, no matter what your physical fitness level at that time, you need to have something more to get you through. I like to reflect on runs like Wednesday night’s terrible trio and remember how deep I had to dig to get through it, because it is memories like these which will help in those dark moments. Remembering the runs in the cold, in the rain, in the wind, in the sleet, up those hills, gives you a better understanding of just what you are capable of, and more than that, they give you a better understanding of just who you are.

What came as such a surprise was how empty my legs felt. I had run 10k the night before, but that is pretty standard at the moment, so it was not that. What I think it was, was that I was seriously underfuelled. I know I have written before that I am trying to lose a bit of weight through this stage of the training plan, so perhaps this was the culmination of taking things a bit too far. For various reasons – work mostly rather than anything preplanned – I had not eaten very much throughout Wednesday, and that, on top of everything else just meant I did not have enough in the tank when I needed it. I cannot be one hundred per cent certain, of course, but I am certainly going to be more aware of the risk of this happening again in the future.

Two and half miles of pain

I usually post a lot of pictures with my blog but this week, only one is necessary. This one. This was the hill I ran up, after the hill reps. I know others will have run up further, steeper hills, and done it much quicker and be than me, but for me this hill represents a lot about finding resilience within myself and for that, I will think about it during my Rotterdam Marathon race. Nine weeks to go.

Big Time

There are milestones in marathon training that signal, to me, different stages of the cycle. I have always regarded as anything over fifteen miles as counting as “big miles”. This week I am back in the big miles.

Fifteen miles is a great milestone to get past. It represents a step up from the half marathon distance and it also is when you get to the point in a marathon race where it is not unreasonable to begin counting down to the finish rather than counting up from the start.

But it also represents something else. That realisation that, despite how great a distance fifteen miles is, there are still more than eleven miles to go to get to the marathon finish line. A marathon is a SERIOUSLY long way.

But every week brings new challenges and this is just another one. The good thing was, when I planned my route, two of my friends offered to join me for parts of it. There is something very special about running with other people when you are going up the distance ladder, so I was really grateful for the company of Jeanette (who joined me for most of the run) and Cara (who did a 10k loop) for this week’s fifteen mile extravaganza.

With Cara and Jeanette at the River Dee

The company of others is a great way to distract you from the various moods and stages you go through on a long run. The easy early miles give way to the “just ticking them off” middle miles and then the hard graft as you push yourself beyond what you have previously achieved to reach the latest target distance. That was what this run really felt like.

The final few miles felt really hard. I had been monitoring our pace throughout the run, trying to keep it easy (ish), but it was not until I got back home later that I realised that through the later miles we actually began to speed up. This would probably explain why I felt so grim as I got to miles twelve and thirteen! Ironically once I got past that, I did feel much better and by the time we reached fifteen I was much more in the groove than I had been.

“work on my fueling strategy”

I also think I need to work on my fueling strategy a bit more. I am trying to lose a bit of weight just now, and I think this may be having an impact as I get to the longer distances. I am not really dieting as such, I have just cut out the morning cakes and biscuits which I would have as part of my work from home routine, and I am watching my portion sizes a bit more. I also have been avoiding beer since New Year, though as I have a few social events in February, I will be having a beer or two over the next few weeks.

In previous marathon training cycles, I have actually put weight on, as it is very easy to eat everything in the house as you are training pretty hard, but I want to drop a few more pounds as every pound you cart around a marathon course counts. At this stage, I plan to stick to the “no cakes and biscuit” routine at least through February and see how I feel then.

“want to try out other approaches”

But perhaps I need to fuel a bit more and drink a bit more the day before my long runs to ensure I do not run out of gas. I am also now running with a gel and also with a protein bar of some kind to eat on the way round. Marathon training is all about getting prepared for the big day and trying different things out, this is simply another thing to keep working at. I know what has worked for me before, but I want to try out other approaches, so that when I get to the start line, I know precisely what my strategy is going to be.

It has actually been a strong and positive week for me. Tough in many ways, but good in many others, and another one to build on. As I wrote about last week, when you are in the midst of a marathon training programme and am struggling a bit, it is all about holding onto positives and focusing on that.

This week I returned to leading the JogScotland 10k group for the first time since I got injured back in early January. I was very nervous about taking the group out, unsure of how I would cope with the faster pace over the longer distance, but I got through it ok. Not perfect, more of a struggle in some parts than I would have liked, but I got it done. I also went to the usual hill reps session, which was pretty brutal, for two reasons. The first was the session itself.

The hill reps chat

But hill reps just are hard, right? Twenty minutes of up and down to test your heart, lungs, legs and head. Buckle up big boy, knuckle down and get them done. But what was especially tough this week was that the location of the reps meant that after I had done that. I then had this to enjoy on the mile and a bit run back home.

The joy of living at the top of a hill

So, as you can imagine, this was not the greatest way to conclude a reps session, but I got through it (mostly) and, a bit like the 10k group leading, it is all about making progress. Every run counts, and these ones where I am pushing myself count for a lot.

This week also saw the end of January, where I finished up with a running total of one hundred and twelve miles. Given at the start of the month I was toiling to run five miles at a time, I am really pleased with this final total. Now it is a case, in February, of building on that and taking the big miles a step further. Next week will be a step back to a half, and then it will move on to seventeen, to eighteen. It is daunting, but it is part of the process. Ten weeks to go.