Week 6 Round Up



Six weeks done already?  I can't believe I'm half way through this training plan, on one hand I'm so pleased that I've made it this far but I'm a bit apprehensive as to what the next few weeks will bring.  Anyway I'll get to what's planned this week later, for now lets talk about week 6.

Monday
Time: 32.32 Distance: 5.71km

Thursday
Time: 47.47 Distance: 8.75km

Sunday
Time: 1.04.03 Distance: 11.53km

Here's the graph for Sunday's run:

Not quite as smooth as some runs, this week's longer run was hard work!  About a year ago me and Mr D were walking along the canal and saw a sign that said Rickmansworth 3 miles and I said that one day I'd run there so that's what I decided to do.

Ian came with me again and so we ran along the main road to Rickmansworth, it all started out nicely, down the hill from home to the roundabout and then it went wrong, you can probably see how slow I was from 1-2km that was all uphill and painful.  There is a nice downhill bit just before you come to Rickmansworth which I was grateful for but a bit worried about slipping over as it was rainy and the pavement is covered by trees so the surface is pretty mossy.  Thankfully I didn't fall on my bum.

Running through the town was nice, it was quite busy for 9:30 but all the people were so polite and let us run past without us having to jump into the road or anything scary.  I was quite worried we'd get lost trying to find the canal path or that we'd go the wrong way but Ian ran ahead and spoke to the lock keeper and we were fine.

I've never been along that part of the canal before and I wish I'd thought it through a bit more because boy was it muddy!!  Most bits you could dodge around pretty easily but there was one patch were you either just had to run through so I went for the edge where I thought it would be less sticky.  Instead it was just mega slippery, I skidded a bit, made a weird loud noise (embarrassing) and as my ankle slipped under me I managed to kick it with my other foot which really hurt.  We weren't too far from home then, probably 2 miles so I decided to just keep going.  It's not too painful now so I should be right by tomorrow's run.

I also had a bit of an incident with a goose.  I'm really scared of birds, and it was a bit of a shock when I came round the corner and there was a great big goose in the middle of the canal bridge.  Ian had run ahead so he wasn't there to shoo it away so I had to keep running and sort of coax it away, I went past and thought it had gone in the canal but it hadn't it was running along after me so I did the only logical thing and sped up.  So that was terrifying but worse was that a very fast proper runner came past me laughing, he'd seen my sad run/arm wave over the bridge to scare the goose.  The Shame.

We're moving on Friday so this weekend was mostly spent packing and didn't leave a lot of room for my cross train session.  Last night I decided I'd do a runners stability session from the book "Real Women Run" by Sam Murphy.  It wasn't very long, just over 30 minutes but anything that will help has to count right?

Well here we are - week 7!!  This is what's in store for me this week:

Monday: Rest

Tuesday: Easy 40 minutes

Wednesday: Rest

Thursday: 5 min easy, 5 min HM pace/threshold x 4 (total 40 mins)

Friday: Rest (move!)

Saturday: X train

Sunday: 75 min easy with middle 20 min at HM pace.

What a totally brutal week.

I've done some pinning on Pinterest this week for a bit of motivation and came across these:

Must try harder to remember this, food lately has been pretty terrible.

And this one which I love:

This is my new mantra for when I'm out running and I get overtaken by faster runners it doesn't matter, I'll probably never see that person again and at least I'm out there doing it, the only thing that matters is that I'm improving and sticking to my plan, not anything anyone else is doing.