Happily Ever After
Life in The Rural Retreat with a beautiful wife, three cats, garden wildlife, a camera, a computer – and increasing amounts about running
Earlier posts can be found on Adventures of a Lone Bass Player, where this blog began life. Recent entries can be found here.
Fitter And Faster – For Now
by Russell Turner - 22:08 on 25 August 2018
Just 50 days and four long runs until t’ Yorkshire Marathon. Today’s, however, was a tiddler – 30 minutes at easy pace – because the training plan thinks I’m about to race a half marathon.
Despite a cool wind and late bed (1.30am) following last night’s wedding gig, the run couldn’t have gone much better. My half-hour covered 2.62 miles – exactly one-tenth of a marathon, which I’ll take as a good omen – 55% of it in the Easy heart zone, 42% in Aerobic and 1% in Warm-up. Where the other 2% went the Garmin doesn’t say. I finished feeling comfortable; another nine of those and I’d have completed the marathon in five hours. I can dream.
Sometimes it feels as though I’ve made little progress, but a comparison with the penultimate run of my couch to 5k, 2.61 miles nine months ago, is illuminating. Today’s pace was 11:28 min/mi; in November it was 12:17. My average heart rate dropped from 141bpm to 133 and the maximum was down from 153 to 143.
Fitter and faster. Definite progress.
How I’ll feel next week is another matter. On Monday I have 31 minutes of warm-up, intervals and cool-down (the plan is very precise) before Thursday’s long run of 2.5hrs and 12-14 miles, although the half marathon distance is my minimum. In March, four weeks before London, I ran/walked 13.1 miles in 2:27 and had to walk the final 0.9 miles because I was exhausted.
How will it feel this time around? Time will tell.
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