Seventeen weeks to go

In case you are wondering, I should have posted this a while ago during the first week in June, but as I was about to go on vacation my focus was on that rather than much else. It's strange how  going away seems to involve extra long days at work and far more washing and ironing than at any other time! It has taken me till now to get round to typing up my notes.

Cast your mind back almost three weeks...

Last week was a blessed rest week following the Great Manchester run. There is a school of thought that says you should rest following a race day and that the rest period  should equal one day for each mile run. It always seems too much time to recover right up until the moment when you try to break the rule. But when you try to do so you suddenly discover that you run as if your legs have no energy or you are about to, as my mother would say, 'go down with something'. If you have any sense you will immediately go home and put your feet up. The Great Manchester run was just over six miles (10K) so six rest days were in order.

Those six days are now over so the fact is, I SHOULD begin running again now. There are all sorts of good reasons I should do so. Work has been stressful. As always my case load is too big, and somehow I have to get it into a state that other people can pick up the pieces whilst I am away. I have found that running is a good way to get the day out of my system at the end of it. But by the time I have got home and made dinner it's almost bed time. And running tends to wake you up rather than prepare you for a good night's sleep...

What I have done however is the running equivalent of tidying your desk and fixing the desk lamp when you are supposed to be writing a particularly troublesome report. I have sorted out my training programme!

For some people training is a simple matter. Every other day they go out wearing running shoes, run for say half an hour and then go home to have a shower. Those who plan well will ensure that they arrive at home after the half hour to save the inconvenience of getting back again. After a period of time they will run for longer, or plan a longer route and try to go faster. And this sort of programme works well for them.

But for me that plan is not satisfactory. For one thing it doesn't allow for my diary and things I might want to do. For another it doesn't allow for the fact that that is exactly the sort of programme which didn't work for me in the past and tended to lead to my getting injured. And of course it doesn't allow for hormones. Men don't appear to have these and I am told that young, leggy women athletes stop having them too, so most running programmes don't take account of  them. But having tracked my performance in the past, I definitely need to either get rid of them or make allowances for the fact that every four or five weeks I will for no apparent reason find it far more difficult than usual to run any distance at all. (This is the other reason I have not actually begun training this week...)

Enough of such sordid things. Let me tell you about my plan.

The first thing you need to understand about me and running is that I use the word 'running' loosely. When I say I ran the Great Manchester run, what I really mean to say is that I walk-and-ran it. It was a great revelation to me that it is OK to walk on a run. In my young days I did it but thought I was cheating. I now know that it helps me recover on the move, and indeed to finish at all. I walked the first mile of the run as a warm up. After that I jogged 90 double paces and walked between 120 and 180 double paces alternately. Towards the end the jogging became briefer with longer gaps in the difficult bits or when I talked to other walking runners.

I have found that this sort of pace suits me and I can keep it up for quite a while. So in principle I could do the same in September's run. But a corner of me wants to do better. I want to run instead of jog, and I want to be able to do it for longer periods of time. And of course I don't want to injure myself so that I don't even get to the start line. This means that any training plan needs to do three things - build up my endurance/stamina, build up the speed I can run and build up the distance I can cover in a single session.

Building up distance is easy. All you have to do is plan longer and longer runs at regular intervals. Of course I could just double what I do now immediately. But that doesn't allow for the fact that lungs, muscle, ligaments/tendons and bones strengthen at different rates. Heart and lungs improve very quickly, which is good news if you want to lower your blood pressure and so on. Muscles adapt and repair reasonably quickly. But ligaments and tendons take longer and bones take even longer again. And ligament or bone damage are the things which will stop you running for a long while. To allow for this it is far more sensible to increase distance gradually over a number of weeks.

To make things easy, I simply planned a series of 4 runs a week using www.myasics.nl/us/ . I find it to be an invaluable free resource. I simply feed in information about what I currently can do and what distance I am training for by when and it does all the hard work.

My training plan includes a short run, two medium runs and a long run. On my short runs I intend to increase the speed I run whilst keeping the recovery time in paces the same. (Sprint 60 double paces, walk 120 double paces) Over time I'll increase the sprinting count but only by 5 double paces per increase and no more than once a week. On the medium runs I will alternately increase the running paces by 10 and reduce the walking paces by 10 again doing this once a week. So by the end I should in theory be able to run more than walk AND run faster too. On the long runs the aim is simply to keep going however I can in reasonable comfort. It looks like a good plan. All I have to do is stick to it!

http://www.justgiving.com/heatherandpete