Back in the groove - Week 2 of 16

28.5 miles running ; 2 swimming sessions.
This was a good week for training.

We had cold crisp, sunny and calm weather for most of the second half of the week and at last it feels like the "true" autumn here in the UK. I feel strong, healthy and pretty well motivated. Apart from some calf stiffness and the knowledge that my achilles tendons are still potential problems, the body feels OK.

4 runs :
- an easy 6 on a traffic-free firm cycle path on monday.
- a 5 mile tempo run in the same place on wednesday.
- an offroad hilly 9.5 mile on friday.
- a mixed 7.5 miler on sunday morning in the company of my two long term running chronies, Paul and Trev.
2 swimming sessions of 30 minutes each on tuesday and thursday mornings.

This week is planned as very similar, but the long offroader will be 11 miles and wednesday's speed session will be 3 x a mile.

Why didn't I think of doing some swimming earlier? However stiff you may feel getting into the pool, it just seems to stretch you out and relax you and you just feel so much fresher on the next day's run. I have "discovered" that the local pool in Thame, just 3 miles away, is perfect for an early morning session. It opens at 6.30 for 2.5 hours of in-lane swimming and I was sharing it with no more than 12 others. 1000m of swimming is still a good work-out for me and I will try to get a bit better and a bit faster week by week.

My endurance seems to be pretty good, as evidenced by the ease with which I completed friday's hour and a half up on the ridgeway - both hilly and over very varied terrain. I won't really know if this impression is correct until I get my overall mileage up a bit and I do a run of more than 2 hours, but the signs are good. Hopefully "the base" is already there from the summer.

Strength / speed is a bit of another matter unfortunately. I know that running a marathon is not about speed, but now I have committed myself to a few races at various distances over the winter, I feel I must try to get my "comfort-zone" training pace down to about 8.30 miling. My body has probably totally forgotten the days when I used to bowl along comfortably at 6.30 pace, but unfortunately the brain is not that forgiving. At the very least I should be able to get under 50 minutes for 10k and get under 1h45 for the half by the end of the winter. This would only put me back where I was in 2000 after all. The wednesday runs and the races are going to be important. There's a couple of races I'm looking at in January, a 10k and a 15 mile. Targets will be set nearer the time.....

Yesterday was the New York Marathon and Eurosport gave it pretty good TV coverage. I watched more and more of it as it became obvious that the All Blacks were going to give our boys a pasting at Twickenham. This years was of particular interest to me for two reasons - Dean Karnazes and Lance Armstrong.

I became a pretty avid enthusiast of the Tour de France from 1987 onwards when the family moved to Switzerland, and I even began to supplement my running in the summer with some pretty serious lone cycling. I bought myself a decent road bike from a guy called Eric Loder, who had a small cycle shop in one of the Geneva suburbs. I remember the walls were covered with photos and trophies from his days as a tour "domestique" and a pro racer. I think he even got on the podium of a stage in the tour once. With mountains all around and feeling fairly fit, eventually the mind gets drawn to the challenge of climbing some of the passes that you see being tackled in the tour. In my case I managed the ascent to St. Cergue in the Jura, the Col de la Faucille, the ascent to La Clusaz and perhaps top of the lot, the "premier categorie" Col de la Colombiere which takes you over the mountains from the ski resort of Le Grand Bornand and down to the Arve valley at Cluses. The feeling in my legs on the last couple of miles of that climb is quite unlike anything I can remember in running, even in the last few miles of my last marathon, and over the last 6 years or so I've watched Lance Armstrong's dominance of the Tour de France with a sort of stupified, head shaking reverance. On a couple of occasions I was glued to my TV when on murderous climbs he would just look across at his rivals, stand up on his pedals and then just "dance" away from them up the climb to literally blow them away physically and psychologically. And in 1997 this man should have been dead, his body riddled with cancer.

This year Lance tackled his first marathon and he got in under 3 hours by a handful of seconds (apparently his VO2 max would indicate that he could be a 2:06 marathoner!). He had pacing from Alberto Salazar, Joan Benoit (both Olympic Gold medalists at the marathon) and Hitcham El Guerrouj, the middle distance phenomenum but nevertheless the marathon brought this super-athlete down to the level of us mere mortals. Here are some quotes from the man himself after the race:


“Even after experiencing one of the hardest days of the Tour nothing has ever left me feeling this bad,” he said at a post-race news conference. “[My shins] started to hurt in the second half, but the bigger problem the last 7 or 8 miles was the tightness in my calves and thighs. My calves really knotted up. I can barely walk right now.”

Armstrong called the race “the hardest physical thing I have ever done.” While he competed in triathlons as a teenager, Armstrong had never attempted a marathon.

“I think I bit off more than I could chew,” he said. “I never felt a point where I hit the wall; it was really a gradual progression of fatigue and soreness.”

There really is hope for all of us plodders!


But can anyone (even Lance Armstrong) ever match what Dean Karnazes has achieved over the last 50 days, when he has run 50 CONSECUTIVE marathons in each of the 50 states of the U.S.A. I chose the picture above because in it he just looks like any other runner - not wiry thin, not looking like he's especially quick, just pounding the streets of his local town. In fact if you read Dean's blog for this stupendous achievement, it's full of respect for the small band of runners who've accompanied him at every re-created race and a humility that Armstrong never had. I'll be buying the book, and the dvd and helping him raise a few quid more for his Karno Kids charity, which is the principle beneficiary of this extraordinary feat. Dean will probably raise less than the $600,000 that Armstrong has raised through the race for his cancer charity, but then Dean never had a relationship with a rock star or put one over on the French, did he?

Time to get the running shoes on and get that first 5 miler done.