March-tastic

5000m goal : 15:50

5k PB : 16:21

5k SB (post-Sept 2011) : 16:21

It seemed like a distant dream 6 months ago, but this month has seen me break two of my PBs, and not those silly PBs like 800m, or Coop and back.  Real manly distances.

My 10k PB dated back two years, and it evaporated on a fresh spring morning 13days ago in an ungentlemanly display of positive splatting to provide me with entry to the ’33 Club’.  I was hoping that would entail a gold plated cup, a lame running belt (you know for gels and stuff) and a date with Darya Klishina, but instead what you get is a congratulatory text of Simon ‘Millhouse’ Millhouse, and a firm handshake of Mister Banks.  They were both appreciated.

Today’s epic showing at the BRAT dominated Park Run, in a time which thankfully wasn’t rounded up despite having to stop suddenly as the finishing funnel featured a 90 degree corner (contrary to my momentum), meant I have had to dust of my abacus to calculate that I’m now a gamely 31 seconds off my goal. 

But it was analysing the data afterwards that raised some (my) eyebrows: despite being more rested for the 10k, I was far more efficient today, with lower average heart rates for every single km.  Coincidently, my times at 3 and 4kms were identical in both races, suggesting there’s some Kenyan in me, and the 624 beats in the final km today meant that this was a lower effort level than its counterpart despite its rapidness. 

	Trafford 10k (11th March)		Park Run 5k (24th March)
	Split	Average bpm	Split	Average bpm
1km	3:15 | (3:15)	184	3:13 | (3:13)	178
2km	3:11 | (6:26)	193	3:16 | (6:29)	189
3km	3:21 | (9:47)	196	3:18 | (9:47)	191
4km	3:22 | (13:09)	196	3:22 | (13:09)	194
5km	3:24 | (16:34)	196	3:11 | (16:21)	195

 Comparison of the opening 5k of Trafford 10k and a 5k race 13 days later.

The verdict of this? I don’t know, but I think it’s interesting, and I am open to suggestions!

The optimists amongst you will also note that I’m now hot on the trails of my apprentice Steven Bayton, who recorded a 10k of 33:55 in March 2010, and 5k of 16:20 in November that year.  Next stop then is projected to be 32:17, give or take a couple of seconds of course.

Indoor roundup

5000m goal : 15:50

5000m PB : 16:29.9

5k SB (post-Sept 2011) : 16:55 (xc split)

One might have been forgiven for thinking I’d lost a bet, forced to sit through (and luckily sleep through some of the) 15 heats of the men’s 400m, after earlier watching over 150 individuals run for 7 seconds, 6 at a time, down a short straight and try to avoid crashing into the railings at the end.  Seeing me warm up in the kit of the magnificent BCU would have done little to dispel this, but the BUCS Indoor Champs at the £24m EIS, where like (but not with) Jess Ennis, I used to train, provided me with a 3000m for my first timed event of 2012.  This was also the first and last indoor event of my season, excluding emergency bathroom dashes and the upcoming house inaugural indoor varsity jenga multi-event champs.

As always, the gauntlet of warming up for big events was more of a trial than the event itself: sprinters don’t like sharing the warm up area with joggers, and communicate this in belittling gestures.  Additionally the call up for heat 3 was 30 minutes before its start, meaning the only thing stopping the muscles from cooling back down were the hearty luck wishes all the way from Lyon, France, the adrenaline from arguing with a power hungry official about why the leg number had to be pinned side and side, not top and bottom, (we didn’t get to the bottom of this,) and wondering if the other competitors had noticed I was the only one wearing trainers.  Dirty ones.

The slow start was presumably because the other competitors had heard the rumours of my wobbling head, and gave me too much time ponder the insufficient testicular fortitude offered by the only shorts which colour coordinated with my vest, and led to a first kilometre which Monsieur Bayton would call a recovery pace.  But as the race stretched out, I quickly laid on a biomechanical master class for the watching cameras, with the event presumably broadcast to over 180 countries worldwide, and the international space station. 

I brushed off recent worries of hernias, tired legs, and my dwindling supply of Weetos to record negative splits, aided somewhat by a ferocious final 200m, which Ibrahim Jeilan is now said to be studying in detail “just in case”.

More interestingly, my 9:29.97 with just over two months to go until the target 5000m, shows that I have in the bank a gentleman’s one hundredth of a second per kilometre.

Top Drawer Encouragement

5000m goal : 15:50

5000m PB : 16:29.9

5k SB (post-Sept 2011) : 17:03 (xc split)

Halfway into the third mesocycle (or is it microcycle – I still don’t know) and I can thank my Steven Bayton augmented training programme for the misery of last night.  On an icy track with the company of a training partner, I bashed out a miserable session that could double as an initiation to hell.

Still the delights of today’s rest day mean that a trip to the shops brings home lots of goodies to tuck into, allowing me to gorge on biscuits, cake and other delightful snacks which I am religiously abstain from for rest of the week.  (I’m holding the Weeto and biscuit stash for a friend).

See all of these belong to Ally [pictured].

I’d like to make a special mention of Chief Movement Coach and Head Motivator Nick ‘Nandos’ Howard.  I don’t know where I would be without this maestro of entertainment.  Several weeks ago he told me I needed to do more drills to enable greater muscle activation.  In a different sentence he told me about some drills he thought would help augment my mobility.  “Don’t do those ones they’re shit,” he told me when I excitedly told him that I had completed them twice this week.  This was in the same phone call that he told me that my 10k PB-pace (garmin-measured) cross country was probably calculated wrong, and I later got a text asking “are you sure you timed it right?” to news of my impressive average from my 6x1000m (2mins) session.  His top drawer encouragement is what keeps me going. 

Still, it has to be speculated that a 5k season’s best split from Saturday’s 8.2km cross country course is indeed a step in the right direction.  Its not a house lead of course, due to a technicality that seems to mean that my times don’t supersede Ally’s.  But exciting news from the IAAF this morning means that my triple jump lead of 1.16m will ‘probably’ be post-ratified for the powerof10 based on available video evidence.

Breakfast bowl musings

5000m goal : 15:50

5000m PB : 16:29.9

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

There are few things I dislike more than someone using my breakfast bowl, but cross county isn’t one of them.  I love cross county.  Not in the minutes before the start, or during.  In those moments cross county and I merely tolerate each other with a mutual distain.  But I get a primal satisfaction from swaggering past people (not actually swaggering) up hills, and chalking off the blades of grass one after another.

This weekend saw me not only make my county championship debut, but also record my highest ever county championships finish.  A majestic six miles on a mild Solihull course saw me finish the 21^st loser in a performance that I can take enough encouragement from to suggest that I am nearing full fitness.  And while they will rightly claim that they have had better days, I take much satisfaction from finishing sandwiched (not literally) between two of BRAT Club’s finest disciples.

Despite me still not having my name to any distance running house leads yet, mainly because I am not yet brave enough to show myself on an accurately measured course, I still retain my 1m16 house triple jump lead, which has somehow survived the onslaught from housemates reenergised after their latest pregnancy scare.  It turned out that Ally was simply wearing a few more layers than he remembered Alison dressing him in.

Horses for Courses

It had all been so promising in June; a PB of 9:20 for 3000m and potential for more on the 1st of the month, but within 3 weeks I was lying on my back with my feet in the air, hoping somehow that being upside down might exorcise the blasted tendonitis.  Since then, I have achieved no PBs, but optimistically did log a 10 minute long-jog in the park with an average heart rate of 172 in early September.  The walk home from that one was both enforced, and to save embarrassment from not being able to make it up the short incline back to our pad without being overtaken by an obese jogger.

But, after 3 months of injury, I’ve made it through the 6 weeks of rehab and built up my mileage from next to nothing and I now sit on some very sore hamstrings and a sore back from my first fast session last night.  How refreshing it is to have aches and pains in different parts of my body from the peroneal, the little finger injury equivalent of not being able to run.

6 months and about a week, this is the time frame until the BUCS outdoor competition which incidentally will be held in the almighty Olympic stadium, and in no way influenced my decision to return to uni to do my Part 3 architecture this academic year.  According to Ally and Alison's cupboard door, i have no current athletic pedigree, with my name almost absent from the 'house season leads' chart carefully blue-tacked parallel to the wood grain.  Fortunately for me however, I did trip over our early learning centre playmat the other day and accidently record a triple jump house lead of 1 meter 16 centimetres, notching my name.  Arguably the most vulnerable discipline on there, Ally has continually threatened to supersede this near world record every time I leave the room.  Still, all-round improvements are needed against my inferred sub-22 minute pace if I'm going to take the required 6 minutes off and not soil the track which Mister Farah will probably be kissing 3 months later.

Speaking of Ally, the current holder of the house leads for 3 and 5km, he appears to currently be my stiffest male house challenger, and after an impressive effort defrosting a sink's worth of ice from our stubborn freezer, I have no reason to doubt that he has logged this as another mile of cross-training on his child-like chart.  The 12th of November is a key date for us, with our scheduled parkrun face-off looming.  The winner will hold the house lead for probably less than 90 seconds until Alison crosses the line (for a women-adjusted leading time), and the loser forced to machine wash their thermal underwear while the heating remains off.