Running around in circles

Yesterday, I went out to help Ben at the Lordshill training session, but as I wasn’t really needed I was able to join Lou and enjoy a sociable run. It was really lovely to be able to catch up with her as I’ve barely seen her for months (mainly because of my hectic training schedule over the summer). We did a series of laps on the street, which was quite interesting as I hadn’t run that particular route before.

Tonight was my first track session since returning from Portugal. I’ve missed running with the Tri Club and I like running on the track, so it was good to be able to join in. When Stu and I arrived, we saw a couple of other Lordshill runners who appeared to have just finished a session. We were a little bit late and the others had started their warm-up – ours started as soon as we got out of the car as we had to run there! We did a couple of laps of the track before the session started. I was wearing a waterproof jacket and visor as it was raining when we left home, but the rain had eased off and I was feeling far too hot.

It was an interesting track session tonight: 100m slow jog; 700m at 3k pace; 100m slow jog; 300m at 3k pace x4

I don’t know what my 3k pace is, so I was aiming for my 5k PB pace, and I just about managed it, with an average pace of 5:07/km. Garmin even gave it a training effect score of 4.9, which is much higher than I expected!

Overall, I really enjoyed the session. I think I might have achieved more if there had been some runners who were of similar ability to me, but I find Huw a supportive and motivational coach, which helps me to try hard.

I’ve now received my race number for Gosport Half Marathon. The race is a week on Sunday, and I’m quite looking forward to it, even though I’m not sure that I’ve trained adequately for it. Last year I genuinely thought that I might be able to get a PB… until I started overheating at 8 miles. This year I’m going with a more sensible strategy – I’m aiming for 1:59:59, rather than 1:52:18. I’ve looked at RunPaceCalc app and know that I need to maintain a pace of 5:41/km (9:09/mile) to be able to achieve my goal. My PB makes it look like it shouldn’t be too hard for me, but it’s the only time I’ve ever run a half marathon in under 2 hours!

I’m thinking of swimming with SUTRI tomorrow night – I’ve not been to a Friday swimming session yet… but this could be a dangerous move as swimming makes me want food (it’s worse than ‘runger’ – running hunger), and I think people go to Sprinkles (a local ice-cream parlour/waffle house) afterwards. However, I’ve had a stressful week at work and I’m desperate to get myself back into the habit of exercising (and blogging) regularly.

I’m going to do parkrun on Saturday, but haven’t decided what I’m going to do on Sunday. I need to get in a final long run before Gosport but can choose between a cross-country race or a training group for Southampton half marathon. Decisions, decisions!

Several friends have shared a blog post from the Guardian today entitled: ‘Does childbirth improve athletic ability?‘It certainly sounds plausible as most of the speediest ladies I know have several children… but as my A-race is in April, it’s not a strategy that will help me to get a PB there!

Finally, I saw this on visual.ly today – I’ve been lazy and have mainly been wearing my trainers with elastic laces in them recently, but it would be interesting to try some of these out to see whether I can feel a difference.

From Visually.

How do you lace up your trainers?