Solo Run: Playing the waiting game

Sunday, 27 March 2011

Playing the waiting game

I misinterpreted the start of my taper as an excuse to take a running holiday with only 5 miles in the bag by Tuesday (32 last week) and following a bit of a push 25 miles clocked before I hit the weekend (65 last week). With back to back medium long runs on Saturday and Sunday I totalled 58 miles for the week, barely scraping past 50% of last weeks total. I had intended cutting back to 70%, but 70% of 114 is still a lot of running (80 miles).

I did replace the high volume with a few faster paces just to get my legs and heart used to working harder. As the week wore on the faster paces came easier as the high volume of the preceding days receded, but still noting that would set any PB's - except perhaps in an ultra.

Yesterday's Club run from UCC Farm was a 15 miler, the first 8 of which were over a hilly rural route to the SW through Maglin, Waterfall and the Viaduct with the remaining miles through the City suburb's including the cycle/walking path from the Straight Road to Curaheen. We finished a few minutes over 2 hours. For the same duration today I ran one of my regular routes into Cork, along the city quays and back out through Sundays Well and the Straight Road covering 16.76 miles at a steady 7:16 pace on a glorious sunny morning. I decided to skip the Mallow 10 miler today, as I had spent the previous 3 weekends at races.

I had a quick look at my rolling 7-day mileage over the last 2 months, since I recovered from my calf strain in Mid-January. I managed to get in 2 blocks of decent volume training, gradually increasing the number of runs and the length of my long runs so that I should have nothing to fear in 2 weeks time - still a whole lot of pain though.