31 weeks remaining, 40 miles and an appreciation for marathon pacing.

This week was really difficult to stay motivated for. I had tweaked a muscle in my back last weekend and although it wasn’t anything serious, it was just niggling enough to make me want to stay in. The weather floating around 0 degrees C for most of the week didn’t improve matters either.

I took Monday and Tuesday off and had to really force myself out the door on Wednesday morning, I only did one loop of the 5.4 mile route and enjoyed listening to the PTI podcast from the night before for the first part of this. After work me and my Dad went to see a Buxton Adventure Festival talk by Nicky Spinks with a “warm up” talk by Aleks Kashefi. I had ran a couple of races with Aleks earlier this year and followed his blogs for the last 2 years or so. My Dad having ran several marathons in the past was never going to take much talking into accompanying me!

I was determined that between both talks I would find something motivating or learn some strategies for ultra marathon running, perhaps not as far as the distances both of these do. I was quite impressed with the answer Aleks gave to one of questions in the Q and A section at the end about comfort zones and acclimatising himself to extreme conditions, the idea of breaking races down into smaller sections is one I have come across several times before, Nicky had a interesting addition to this about how she used support runners and timed her sections around the support. I have a race in mind for 2019 where I would be allowed 2 separate pacers for sections in the second half of it so was glad to gain some knowledge around this.

I only managed a lap of the 7.5 mile route on Friday morning and Saturday morning, these were uncomfortably cold but pretty uneventful otherwise. I made the mistake of taking my gloves off for my warm down walk after Friday’s effort and the sweat on my hands froze immediately! I certainly won’t be doing that again!

I was wanting to average 50 miles a week in my training for the Paris run so anything below 40 miles for the week was just not going to cut it! Although I had set off later in the day than usual today, I was quite pleased I could set off at a faster pace and maintain it for the duration of my 20 miles, this was a 2 mile run to the local park in Manchester and then 8 laps around it’s outskirts. I didn’t take any water or snacks and was adamant I would be back in about 3.5 hours. Whilst I dislike the lack of hills in this park, it does lend itself to runners powering round it at a faster pace than usual. One of my first races in 2010 was the Sale 10 mile race held at this park and I remember how shocked I was feeling like I was going reasonably fast for me hitting the 4 mile marker in 29 minutes and some Kenyan guy overtaking me and flying past the 6 mile marker about 50 yards ahead.

Despite not being at my 2010 pace, I did just get under my target time and was comfortably warmer from forcing the pace for this. I had a quote from Dean Karnazes in my head as motivation, it’s not very often I get to force myself at that pace but I did enjoy it today