Its all just numbers, right?

5000m PB : 16:29.9

5k SB (post-Sept 2011) : 17:36 (Park Run)

Today marked a personal milestone for myself, which was then completely overshadowed by the magnificent Steven Bayton, who ran 31:28 for 5k.  Or maybe 10k, I don’t recall.  Let’s do him first.  A runner who 18 months ago, every other session I huffed and puffed over the line ahead of his elegant stride, regardless of whether he’d moderately slowed to clear rogue footballs a mile in the air to teach those public users in Weston Park that this wasn’t an area of green to enjoy oneself in.

Steve’s rise to fame and moderate success has been well documented on this blog, but just how good is he?  Well to put it into perspective, today, by coincidence he’ll have me believe, he ran 2 back-to-back 5Ks both one second faster than my goal for the year.  Is that a coincidence?  Yes, indeed I also thought there might have been a malicious undertone to it as well.  Revenge perhaps because he could never beat me up the final hill in Hillsborough park on those cold winter evenings.

Let’s put this another way.  Steve is now over 2 and a half minutes faster over 10k than my best ever time, ignoring my current obese state.  Phenomenal.  Steve is a great athlete, and he trains hard, but for him to run those times just makes it all seem so easy.  So perhaps it is easy.  I’m certainly inspired.  I need to up my game.  Drastically.  Surely it can’t be that hard to run 33 or even 32, if a guy I was once even with has bettered that.

Which brings me to me, and my achievements (sorry to keep you waiting).  Today marked the culmination of the 2^nd hard week in my first microcycle of training.  As you probably inferred, because why wouldn’t you, I have 6 of those tiny cycles in the next 5 and a half months.  So why all the hype?  Why even bother blogging?  I ask myself the same thing.  Because today meant that I hit 65.7, and that 0.7 is very important because it rounds it up, miles for the week.  That’s my first post-injury week over the 60 mile milestone, and my highest mileage week in 6 months.  Which isn’t bad.  I don’t think I can call myself injured anymore, I now just have to settle for the terms ‘unfit’ or ‘useless at racing’ instead.  For those wondering how I did it, it’s all very clever I assure you.  Every footstep is planned, every breath calculated.  And hopefully by new year I should have some semblance of fitness again ready to hit some PBs myself.  Because the bar has just been raised further.

With a week in the Derbyshire countryside coming up, and a 24 hour hotline to my chief personal motivator Nick ‘Nandos’ Howard, and chief de-motivator Ally ‘The Beast’ Canahow, mother’s home cooking, and a cake I just baked which may or may not be edible, I now have all the tools to stop talking about what I’m going to do, and just do it.

Finally, it has been brought to my attention that there are other pb’s today, and as such I’m led to believe that there will be a new house lead on the cupboard when I return home next week.  I think it might have been a tennis ball which rolled off the counter to hop, skip and bop its way to a triple jump record.