21 weeks, 60 miles, 3 days covering 15 miles a day and a new viewpoint around mistakes

This week I tried a different approach to including a rest from the long training run while still maintaining a high mileage when my shorter runs were combined for the whole week. I generally tend to associate most of my endurance base growing by being calloused to doing a long run each week and forcing myself through it. The risk around doing this all the time is that I end up either getting injured or resenting my hobby! This weekend is 2 years since I first tried to cover 12 laps on the Last One Standing course in Belfast. I really loved parts of my build up to this race back then and there were times in my training where I had been adamant I was doing enough miles to be able to cover the 50ish miles that would have entailed.

As long time readers of this blog will know, I got injured part way through the training and managed 10 laps instead of 12. The initial injury wasn’t much of anything and started as a sprain to the top of my foot but I trained on it until I could barely walk and lost about a fortnight as a result.

The plans I’ve loosely come up with in terms of weekly mileage building up to my next races in May and July allow for a generous taper in the few weeks before both and very little training altogether in June. This means I have to manage most of my high mileage weeks in March and April.

I have tried to rationalise this approach of only doing shorter runs this week as like balancing my training by treating the week as a whole rather than working backwards from the long training run. This is easily visualised by using the water tube toys similar to below

Essentially the most I would be able to do at this point in my training would be the entire snake, when it is squeezed at one end, the other end expands. This correlates with when I’ve done little during the week and gone out to run 32-34 miles at once on a weekend, likewise when I’ve done 40-45 midweek miles and my long training run drops down to about 20 miles.

This week is the closest I’ve come in any of my training for ultras to leaving the snake “undisturbed”. I did 2 laps of the 7.5 mile route, once before and once after work on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday with additional laps of the same route on Thursday and this morning.

My highlight from using the podcasts while out running to keep my ears company was from a Joe Rogan podcast interviewing Johann Hari. I had gone off the Joe Rogan podcasts previously as it got under my skin a bit when he would contradict an expert on their subject matter. This reminded me of an expression about arguing with stupid people being like trying to play chess with a pigeon. I can’t remember the exact wording but it was along the lines of “Regardless of what moves you’d make the pigeon would just shit on the board and strut around like it had won!” In past podcasts I’d listened to,Joe had displayed predominantly pigeon like qualities.

He was better than I had remembered for this episode and it was mostly plugging Johann Hari’s new book about depression and anxiety. I enjoyed every second of this and could relate to virtually all of the points made by both. I had listened to the nearly 3 hours of discussion on Wednesday while out running and found a good quote from Johann later that evening that is a good point on which to end this week’s blog.