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.

Goals as achievable targets

5000m PB : 16:29.9

5k SB (post-Sept 2011) : 18:30 (training split)

Just under 6 months to go until BUCS 5000m.  Plenty of time?  Seeing me sit here in my birthday Onesie you might be forgiven for thinking so.  In all my time as a pseudo-athlete you’d think I’d have learnt to manage my expectations.  Goals are just numbers, but it’s too easy to pick one and think it so many times it no longer sounds good.  You then keep increasing the goal, and then end up with disappointment.  All of a sudden a 28 minute 10k doesn’t seem fast enough, and your latest 34 minute effort just makes you miserable enough to eat a whole pack of hob nobs.  Now you’re not race weight, and the cycle of doom continues.  So how do I pick what I want to achieve?

In 6 months time, I can announce, my target is to be in a position to run 15:50 for 5000m.  It might not happen on the day for a dozen different reasons, but I want to be in a position to achieve it.  3:10 a km, 76 second a lap, for 12 and a half gruelling laps.  Hell I’ve even run 3 of those back to back.  3 kilometres that is.  So surely this is achievable?  Picking a goal so slow that if achieved will still be 3 minutes slower than the world record, so slow in fact that Keninisa Bekele would have lapped me 3 times (I think) might sound unambitious.  But for me this would represent a 40 second, or 4.5% improvement over my current best time.  But as proved by others, namely Steven Bayton (2010), magical things can happen that cause targets to be re-evaluated, or illness, injury, demotivation, or just plain bad luck can de rail even the prettiest and most efficient excel spreadsheet.

So where am I at the moment?  And how do I get to where I want to be?  Having just recovered from a summer out with injury, leaving me with the ability to only run for 10 lung-wrenching minutes, I’ve now completed 8 weeks of transitionary training.  This is my honest assessment of where I am now, compared to where I need to be:

VO2 max :                   worse than a sedentary horse.

Endurance :                 modest.

Lactate threshold :      physically to shy to try.

Muscular strength :    laughable.

Technique :                 lets just say there lots of room for improvement.

Weight :                      not race weight.

Potential :                    … meh.

Cold winter mornings, long dark runs, grass hill after grass hill, hour after hour thinking about technique, weights, cross country races that hopefully don’t involve me falling on my face in the mud (again), continuous hunger, mind numbing drills to improve my form, ice baths, and Ally constantly ordering to improve my posture at the dinner table.  Those who know me know that I must have a constantly evolving yet structured training programme, planned out for month after month.  Am I going to make it?  Watch this space…

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.

Tough Times

It’s been a difficult Christmas for Steve Bayton, aged 12.  Fresh from - apparently - underperforming in the Percy Pud 10K, in a disappointing personal best of 32:17, he spent the rest of his day’s energy trying to save his obnoxiously over-sized trophy from being smashed into its inherent materials and recycled in the corresponding containers as Tesco’s recycling plant. 

Bayton’s misery was compounded by visiting his new coach and receiving the news that his potential is being limited by tight hamstrings, poor flexibility in his right quad, weak glutes and hip flexors, and that his thoracic pillar strength needs improving, possibly more on right.  I mean what worse way to hit a man than in his right-thoracic pillar strength.  Ouch. 

The man now also has some serious continuity problems, with none of his other times lining up with this new one.  His 3k pb is only 3 seconds faster than his 3k split in this race, his 5k is slower, and since McMillian’s time prediction are essentially PBs themselves, his 76 minute half just doesn’t live up to the 2h30 marathon he presumably entered in his notebook.

What’s more, I have asked my mother to rescind Steve’s open invitation to my house, without which he will struggle to win next years Burton 10K Classic in my own backyard.

There is however, an air of optimism about the ginger Huddersfield community (no offense to anyone) where he resides.  Rumour has it that he completed 14 unassisted press ups within this last week, which is only 1 shy of his lifetime best. 

Come rain or shine though, I believe that Mister Bayton will line up on the starting line at BUCS, with rumour suggesting that Danny Brewer will be relegated to the ‘B-race’ this year, to avoid Steve being manhandled again whilst spectating and humouring the lower calibre of runners.