Training Report 5

19 weeks to the Lausanne Marathon.
17 weeks to the Phedippidations World Half Marathon Challenge (at Henley on Thames)
13 weeks to the Robin Hood Nottingham Half Marathon.
8 weeks to the Regents Park Summer 10k.

Summer has arrived in the UK and so has the World Cup on our TV's. The sight of highly paid professional athletes wilting in the heat and struggling to hydrate is a graphic demonstration of what all we runners go through once the temperature rises. We each seem to have a tolerance level which we hope edges upwards as the summer progresses. For me it starts at about 20-22 celsius and I can eventually feel comfortable in the mid twenties. In Australia in February, I could eventually deal with 28-30 degrees. Higher I think is impossible. And for me personally there's no alternative but to defer or scale back on my running. Certainly I have to be happy at a slower pace.

This last week it has been in the mid twenties most of the time and having run 38 miles last week, Sunday to Saturday, this week I was happy with 29. Right now I'm contemplating my first run this week and it is about 28 degrees and humid - oh well. Five and a half miles mainly on grass beckons.

I've added another "target race" to the list and have persuaded Lisa, my 22 year old daughter, to run with me. Lisa has been running casually for a few months now, mainly around the roads near to her flat in West London in the evenings. I am pretty sure Lisa has the "runner mentality" - she did a great deal of long distance swimming training when she was in her early teens and interestingly she told me that she has the highest lung capacity amongst her peers. (She's a med student and they get to measure that sort of thing I guess.)
Anyway we have sent off the forms today for the Regents Park 10k race on August 5th, one of a series of saturday morning low key races there throughout the summer. The course will be familiar to me at least. I did a lot of running in the centre of London in training for my 1998 London Marathon and Regents Park provides you with a great deal of relatively flat traffic free paths to run on. There's also the possibility to run hill sessions across the street on Primrose Hill, something that serious club runners from inner London clubs used to do in groups quite frequently on weekday evenings. I once found myself on one of these sessions with a group including a couple of sub-4 milers, under the whip of a "proper" coach! I suffered as can be surmised - it was a long time ago.

I hope I can help Lisa around this one and I may just push out for the last mile, just to measure my strength. We'll see!

The longest run this last week was on the sunday. I took an isotonic drink with me as I ran a hilly 9 mile road circuit through some nearby villages and listened to a couple of podcasts on my mp3 player, both of which unfortunately annoyed me (maybe I was in the wrong mood). One was a "podsafe" music show which contained some pretty good music called Accident Hash, I'm sorry to say that C.C. Chapman's interjections annoyed the hell out of me. The other one was a runner podcast to which the same applied. Both have now received the "thumbs down" unsubscribe in itunes on my laptop. This never happens to me with Phedippidations and once again I have to thank Steve Runner for having the best "Goofy Little Podcast" I have yet found. No. 48 about "becoming a good animal" helped me through an extremely sweaty 40 minutes last thursday evening. Thanks, Steve, for finding such fascinating material and treating all your subjects and correspondents which such humility and respect. Keep up the GLP's!

I have found another good podcast which appears three times a week and although they rarely last longer than 20 minutes, 3 together can make "a run". It features a series of interviews with endurance athletes which wll take your mind away from your own struggle with your cardio-respiratory system, as you marvel at what can be achieved with true dedication. Just click on this link to Endurance Planet.

I think this is my last week of running before I go onto a proper 18 week schedule for my marathon. These five weeks of "preamble" have given me more opportunities than I thought I would get to run at weekends and I have also managed several runs of 10 miles or more, which put me ahead of where most schedules start. For this reason (and my inability to run when I work at weekends), I may have to adapt a schedule considerably. Some thought needed on this during the week - probably while watching evening world cup games.