Week 7 summary

Mon – 6 miles easy (7:27m/m)
Tue – 8.2 miles general aerobic (6:54m/m)
Wed – 12 miles inc 7 mile tempo @ 6:02 (6:33m/m avg)
Thu –  AM 6 miles easy (7:16m/m) PM 4 miles easy (7:32m/m)
Fri – 15 miles medium long (7:13m/m)
Sat – 5.3 miles inc 2.2 miles cross country relay (6:52 m/m avg)
Sun – 24 miles long run (7:35m/m)

Total – 80.5 miles

7 weeks to go, and this was a peak mileage week with a couple of key sessions.

A gentle start to the week with an easy 6 miler on Monday and a progressive 8 miles on Tuesday, just keeping things ticking over for the 7 mile tempo run in the diary for Wednesday.

The tempo session was sandwiched in the middle of a 12 mile run, and turned out pretty well. I decided to take it a tiny bit slower than the last tempo run, 7 miles tempo equates to around 45 minutes of hard running, and taking advice from Jack Daniels Running Formula again I aimed for 6:08m/m. Well, once I started that pace seemed too slow so I settled for 6:02 instead 🙂 Kept this up all the way through, and was happy to complete a good long tempo session without any difficulties.

Thursday was a double, two laps round Wormwood Scrubs in glorious sunshine at lunchtime for 6 miles, and another 4 in the evening completed the day. Friday was my weekly medium long run, and the 15 miles went by easily. The only downside was a slightly sore hamstring in my right leg, which was to trouble me for the next few days.

On Saturday it was the 61st running of the Horsenden Hill Cross Country relays, organised by our club and thought to be the oldest XC relay in the world! It used to be a grand affair with many big names from British athletics taking part over the year, but now it’s a slightly diminished event with far fewer numbers in attendance. With 6 laps for the men’s event, and a little over 2.2 miles per lap it’s a good chance to really let fly. I was quite happy with my race, clocking 12:20, which is 5:32 m/m pace. Unfortunately many of our fast runners were injured or unavailable, so we only came in 5th overall.

Sunday was dedicated to the longest long run of the build up. I ran this solo and in the rain, though that wasn’t really a problem. Right hamstring was feeling a bit sore and tight still, so I decided to run a looped course in case the it got seriously worse and I needed to cut things short. After a bit of thinking I came up with a course of 2 x 9 mile laps, followed by a shorter lap of 6 miles. Mentally this worked well as the promise of a short last lap made it all seem that bit easier 🙂

Pacing wise I just took it quite easy, not wanting to blow the hamstring. Although the splits look a bit erratic, this is mainly because of a few stiles and other obstacles at certain points along the course. The effort around these was even pretty much throughout the run.

Hamstring problems aside, I’m quite happy with this run. It didn’t feel particularly hard and I could have gone on longer without much trouble.

I might take a rest day tomorrow to give the hamstring a chance to recover, some regular icing and stretching should sort it out. I want to be in good shape for the Bath Half next Sunday…

Tags: cross country, vlm, vlm2012