Week 7 Round Up

Tuesday:  Training Plan - 40 minutes easy
Time: 43:45
Distance: 7.93km

Thursday: Training Plan - 5 min easy, 5 min HM pace x 4 (40 Minutes Total)

Time: 42:42
Distance: 7.83km

Not very happy with Thursdays effort, seeing as I was running 20 mins of that at a faster pace I should have covered more distance than I did on Tuesday!  Thursdays run was tough, I left my water bottle in the office and it was so warm out I immediately was in a mood with myself. 

The run wasn't a total waste of time though, as I learnt a valuable lesson.  DONT eat ryvita for lunch on days where I'm running!  I had such bad stomach cramp after about 20 minutes and that was all I could focus on my head really wasn't in it and I've never wanted to give up so much as I did then.

On Friday I moved house so I decided I'd use that as my cross training for the week as the programme includes "light weights" as an option.  In the end I'm not sure that lifting sofas, beds, mattresses and the rest of our possessions up and down stairs in 2 houses for a total of 4 + hours necessarily counts as "light" weights but never mind.

I didn't run on Saturday like I have done for the last few weeks I was totally wiped from the move and my parents were staying so Mr D and I went out yesterday instead.

Sunday: Training Plan - 75 Mins easy with middle 20 at HM pace

Time: 1:18:10
Distance: 13:31

My first run from the new house, so that meant a new route! I planned the bulk of it on MapMyRun and decided to take a road I barely even knew about into a wood that I'd never been in either.  As I'd not driven up the road before I decided to look on google maps to get a feel for where I needed to go.  Something I have learnt from this is that there is no sense of elevation on google maps so it was a bit of a surprise when we came round a corner and in front of us was a terrifying hill!  Luckily that was about 20 minutes into the run and I was still running at easy pace otherwise I'd have died - for sure.

Despite the hills of death the route was amazing. As we were going up that steep road you could see the Grove Country Club and Golf Course across the fields.  I can't believe we've lived here nearly 3 years and we'd never been in the wood, it was gorgeous (was also glad of some shade by that point too!):

Just beyond that trail above it opens out onto... a golf course?!  I sped up a bit there to make sure I got well out of the way of the people on the tee, didn't want to get knocked out or anything.  Whilst I was looking for a picture to pop on the blog I have found out that some of Star Wars - The Phantom Menace was filmed in that wood - who knew?

When we got to the edge of the wood we decided we'd run the canal like we normally do as Mr D really loves it along there.  After that we ran up the road past where we used to live which is quite a long slow incline and thankfully that's where the 20 minutes of faster pace finished - I couldn't have gone on at that speed much longer.  From there we went through town, along the road we both work on and then up the main road all the way home.  I don't think I've ever been so glad to hear the voice in my earphones telling me time was up!

Here's the graph for the run:

I'm pretty pleased with that.  You can see where the big hill was (just after 4km) when I really slowed down and you can see a difference in the pace for the middle 20 minutes at HM pace.

You can also see at the top that this was another run that ended with some PB's.  As the run was so long I wasn't expecting it to be particularly fast so that was a nice bit of motivation - here's the stats:

According to the Nike+ app I burned 796 calories which will have come in useful seeing as this week's eating has been so poor.

I did a huge shop on Saturday and all of our kitchen is sorted now so normal service should resume, and it can't come soon enough, I feel bloated and tired and generally rubbish after having so much takeaway and easy food.  Bleurgh.

So that was last week, today is Monday and its time to see how training will look this week:

Monday - Rest
Tuesday - 30 min easy
Wednesday - Rest
Thursday - 40 min easy
Friday - Rest
Saturday - X train
Sunday - 50 min easy with middle 25 at HM pace

Week 8 looks ace to me, only trouble might be my shin.  I haven't worn my compression bandage or taped my shin for the last week or so when maybe I should have as after yesterdays long run I have some serious pain going on.  I spent last night icing with frozen peas and elevating and today its still pretty painful so I'm wearing the bandage at work.  I'm hoping that tomorrow its stopped hurting enough to have my 30 minute run in the morning.  If not I'm not sure what to do???  I really don't want to miss any training sessions but I don't want to make this worse either - guess I'll have to wait and see what tomorrow brings???

PB

For once I'm not talking about Peanut Butter - but I'll get to that later.

Monday's run was 30 mins with last 10 minutes at threshold/HM pace.  Now I don't have GPS and even if I did I put my iPod in my back pocket so I wouldn't be able to look at it to know how fast I was going so when its time to do HM pace I just make sure I speed up and try and stay at that pace.

Time: 32:32
Distance: 5.7km

Yesterday the training plan called for a 45 minute run with the first and last 15 mins at east pace and the middle 15 at threshold/HM pace.  I mapped a 5 mile route at lunch going a way that I hadn't been before for a bit of variety - good idea I thought... WRONG.  The 30 seconds or so was downhill which meant I spent the next few minutes climbing, a little drop down then onto the  flat, which was great until I came to another climb to get into town, worse still that was when the first 15 minutes was up and it was time to pick up the pace.

It was raining which I've realised I don't really mind too much when I'm running it keeps you cool and people can't really tell what's rain and what's sweat so that's a bonus!  Also as it was raining there were less people around town which made life a bit easier, less people to dodge and no-one shouted anything out so I'd say that's good news.  I'm not sure if it was because of the rain or sweat or because I just hadn't put it on properly but all of my zinc oxide tape on my legs came off really quickly so I was a bit worried about my calves and shins/

I ran out of town and towards home and started to realise I'd get home sooner than I thought so I went off the main road and up and down some of the side streets to make up distance and finally my iPod told me I'd done 30 minutes and I could slow down.  Some tightness in my calves but other than that everything was fine.  I just kept thinking of that saying " its not your legs giving out its your mind giving up" and that seemed to help.

I did get to home much sooner than I thought so I ran down to the end of the road and back up the big hill and then back round and then I walked up the alleyway to home to stretch out my legs.

Time: 47:47
Distance: 8.7km

I'm pretty pleased with that but when I logged into my Nike + account last night I had a few pop ups which were a nice surprise:

A run full of PBs.  I really love the Nike app when you see things like that it makes it seem like I am getting better at this running lark and I'm feeling pretty positive for this weekends longer run now.