Jibbering Musings

I took most of the year off running, concentrating on cycle racing, with barely a couple of runs a month (generally a 3mile all out race, and a hill session) but I was doing lots of hard cycling miles.

My previous PB for the half marathon was around 1:59 for a standalone half, and 1:43:49 for the half marathon split in a marathon. But I think the goal was a feasible one, as two weeks before the race I did 66:09 for the Cabbage Patch 10mile race.

That race was completely flat though, Barns Green is rolling, and the weather forecast for today, was torrential rain, 30mph winds with gusts up to 45mph. I almost bailed.

It was my running clubs Half Marathon championships, so I had lots of friendly faces, and started off running the first few miles with two of them, and watching the faster club guys come past (not sure why they’d all lined up 200 back, I crossed the start line around 80th or so, which was about right, not held up, not holding anyone else up)

The rain wasn’t as bad as it could’ve been, mostly just drizzle, the winds however were strong, and it’s the first running race where I’ve seen real packs form - not just pacing packs, but actual draft packs, it made a big difference!

The rolling course made my splits tough to know just how even they were - 6:32, 6:39, 6:38, 6:17, 7:11, 6:23 for the first 6 miles, and coming through half way in 44:00 - This worried me, because of the weather I’d scaled back my expectations to getting as close as I could to 1:30, on a good day I was thinking 1:28 was the best I could do. (McMillan reckons a 66:09 10mile is equivalent to 1:27:51 Half, and I normally bias towards the short stuff and Barns Green is tougher than the completely flat Cabbage Patch)

I run on perceived exertion though, so I stuck with the pace I was running. At around 8miles two more guys from my club passed me but I kept them in sight and it was at this point that my running partner from the start of the race dropped behind.

The 10mile marker had been blown away by the wind I guess, as I saw the line on the ground but didn’t hit the watch. Mile 12 became a struggle, all up hill and into the wind, and I was disappointed to see the split come in at 7:26 - although the Garmin has it as a long split.

I knew from 12miles it was all down hill until 400m to go, and I still had 9 minutes to cover the last 1.1 miles. I tried to work to catch the team-mate I could still see ahead. It never happened, but 7:20 for the last 1.1 miles, and a sprint to beat some guy in yellow in the last 100m brought me home in 1:28:25.

Job done, very, very, very happy considering the conditions. I guess I should’ve done better in the Cabbage Patch. A positive split, 44:00 vs 44:25, but not too bad, and I think the course was tougher in the second half.

My Nutrition - went to plan, 100 calories in home made strawberry gels with ~400mg caffeine 20minutes before the start, Gel flask with water/gel mix of around 250calories taken over four seperate evenly spaced shots.

I would recommend Barns Green Half as a race to do, extremely well organised despite the torrential rain and conditions, an interesting and whilst hilly not that slow a course, the hills aren’t steep, so as long as you can descend without braking the undulations help break the monotony. Could do without the long hill at 11miles though.

It’s common for people to set themselves goals for the year, particularly in sports. I’m not very good at this, but at the beginning of the year I set myself two, to run 40 minutes for a 10km race, and to run 90 minutes for a half marathon. Neither were particularly tough goals, in fact I completed the first without training for it more as an incidental. The second I’ve yet to be motivated to attempt, particularly as it does require me to properly train for it.

I’ve spent the year essentially goalless, but still pretty committed to getting fitter, getting better, and training. It’s tough to know if the lack of directoin has held me back at all, but without goals you only do what you enjoy. Fortunately I enjoy training, so have done a fair bit. Recently though I’ve started to lose my way.

I raced the Pearson Jaunts 5 day stage race at the end of June, it would’ve made a good goal for the year, but I only became elligible to race it a couple of weeks before as I moved up to become a 3rd Cat rider. I had a pleasing race, although finished well down after a bad time trial, and a mechanical which lost me a lot of time on the first road race.

What knocked me back though, was a crash a couple of days later, when I got taken out in the sprint of another road race, when I was perhaps on course for my best finish. Since then I’ve not trained enough, and I’ve slowly been losing fitness, which has resulted in another crash as I was straining too hard to not get dropped when racing well above my level.

As a data geek, aswell as now a fitness geek, I keep records of every workout I do, for this I use SportTracks. A great piece of software, with many plugins available created by the large developer community around it. Training Load provides a visualisation of fitness and fatique.

The output of the training load plugin is something like this:

The red line is my “fatigue”, this is basically the amount of exercise done recently, the blue line is my “fitness”, this is the amount of exercise done over a longer period. (I use 11 days and 45 days for the two values) Each workout or race is given a score based on how stressful it is, this is based on time spent in various heart rate zones. It takes some care to set up your zones to be meaningful, fortunately Maryka on the Sport Tracks forum has posted a how to and although I also tweaked them some more, they end up extremely close to the values WKO+ gives me using Power. Heart Rate is a surprisingly good proxy, well within the general inaccuracies of the method.

You can see my fitness slowly rising from a low start (it wasn’t quite that bad before really, I simply didn’t collect the data) I dropped back a lot in July 2008, as me and Maryka both took a break after her Ironman. December 2008 I had another big dip as I was waylaid with flu, and simply Christmas and the cold weather getting in the way. A big rise at the end of January after a week in Lanzarote hard training. And you can see my poor performance with training since July.

In 2008 I managed to keep increasing fitness through the autumn because of the Nice-Cannes marathon goal in November, and whilst the goalless, just training to train drove my fitness well up until June. I think I had better get a goal again now, otherwise it will just drift down, and as it does that, my happiness will drift down with it, and my weight drift up.

So I’m looking for a goal, something to get me through the winter fit, any ideas?

I signed up for this marathon in the winter after having unfinished business with the last one having failed to get the 3:30 target. It’s pretty flat, very fast, lots of competitors and well supported. Unfortunately my training’s been very poor, I was sick in December, and simply haven’t been motivated enough to do any long runs since, cycling has been more fun. My longest run pre-marathon was around 10miles. So not great preparation.

Annoyingly the organisers had me as a “recreational” runner, which means unlike the club runners (the majority) or the Elites, I wasn’t chip timed. So I needed to get myself near the front of the pens, and with some dodging and weaving past the crowds of club runners, I managed to end up crossing the start line only 12 seconds after the gun went.

Despite the manouvering, I was still passing a lot of very slow people strung across the road. I normally start too fast anyway, but with the added bonus of lots of people to pass and gaps to find, I started very fast. Up and across the Erasmus Bridge, 2km came by in 7:56, but I was still feeling pretty good running along with everyone and decided to keep at the pace, even if it turned out I couldn’t hold it.

The 5km mark was after a complete 180 turnaround coming back on the same road you were running down, so at 4.75km I could see the marker and looked at my garmin and then it hit me, I was going to get a sub 20minute 5km. But my 5km PB was 20:35, what was I doing going so fast? Sure enough the 5km marker was crossed with 19:38 on the clock, almost a minute off the 5km PB, but I still had the entire rest of the race to go, could I keep the pace up?

I couldn’t, the sun had come out more, and I was really beginning to overheat, I’d dressed for 9C and clouds, and it was about 15C and sunny. I pressed on, two more kilometers went by in 4:09 and 4:06. Then we had another bridge to go over, it wasn’t steep, hardly even a hill. Howevre my hip flexors which were hurting from about 30km in the last marathon began to scream at me today after only 7km, and I only managed the next two km in 4:11 and 4:10. I was definately slowing down a lot by now, but seeing the 9km marker and looking at the Garmin saying 35:55. I decided to press on and really work for the rest of the race, the time was still pretty good.

There were very few people around me, but I guy in blue came past and I tried to keep with him, and then just after a kink in the road, I saw the glorious site of the word FINISH over a gantry, and a clock counting down next do it. I sure was glad I’d swapped to the 10km race from the marathon the day before when collecting the numbers. With about 20m to go, the big clock rolled over the 40:00, and I crossed the line just beating the guy in blue to stop my Garmin at 39:51.

So a very pleasing outcome for the 10km - 93 seconds off of my PB. Marred by some disappointments - the leg pains that slowed me down and the lack of official result, that actually says I ran that time. They don’t even give me a gun time, which would’ve been 40:03, it’s as if I never ran the race.

I know I did, and I know it was a PB, I also know that 39minutes is probably doable on a good day on a similarly fast 10km with some actual training, so that should probably be my next goal