It’s been a far more consistent period of running for me, since my last post here. My weekly mileage has been moving up to 40- 45 miles per week, with the usual decent key sessions spread over the week. Hopefully I can start to make a venture into the low to mid 50s in the next month. In some ways it’s more than just being able to do the mileage again, it’s about having that confidence to be able to run hard without the fear of a niggle turning into something worse.
A number of things have helped during October, which were in some ways sparked by going to see Blade Runner 2049:
I am big fan of the first film and the sequel certainly didn’t disappoint. What I really like about the film is how it questions what it means to be human, what constitutes our identity and ultimately can we trust our memories of the past. In relation to running what it got me thinking about was how I thought about my running. I realise that I may have come to think about my marathon running in a way that is too narrow. What this has meant in practice is that I would only try to work around a training plan that catered for marathon running, as well as the training that went with that, and any other races that were built towards that 26.2 mile race. Simply put anything that wasn’t specifically to do with my marathon training I didn’t pay much attention to it.
That has now changed from my experiments with different approaches to training over the Summer. Whilst the Summer of 2017 did not result in the best races, or training progression for that matter; it did show me the benefit of increasing my mileage during the week ,and then doing a quicker but shorter long run over the weekend. After my marathon training at the beginning of 2017 I thought with the slightly lower mileage it would be easier. In fact I found it pretty damn hard, as the training fatigue combined with the heat made me quite tired. My track and tempo sessions weren’t great for this period, but what it gave me was a way of focussing on those workouts and I how approach them.
