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.

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.

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.