Friday, January 05, 2007

on to the next challenge - 20M in 5 weeks!

My running has been a bit lacklustre recently - although I've maintained about 5 runs a week of about 45 mins, I haven't run for more than an hour since the marathon and running has slipped a bit in my list of priorities over the past month. Now that my son is well again and he and my daughter are back at nursery / school, it's time to ramp things up again..

To kick things off, my friend Stephen has suggested we run the Stamford 30K on February 11th. This is aimed at London marathoners, I guess, though even for them it's early on to be doing 20M races, let alone for someone like me who hasn't gone very far for quite some time. A good indication of how slack my running has become is that I haven't used my heart rate monitor / distance measurement thingie since Chicago either..

Anyway - it'll get me moving and I'll decide closer to the date whether I'll actually go through with it. I can always just diesel it - they've got pacing teams this year going as far back as (gasp) 11 minute miles so I'll just hook up with them and chug in, eventually. Steve Phedippidations Runner did a great podcast recently, attacking the points a writer made who criticised the slower runners in marathons. Being a back to mid packer myself, I wholeheartedly agree with him. Am running the race with 2 men though so I imagine they'll be psyching each other up to go all out. Oh the joys of being a woman and just being able to ignore all that..

As far as a schedule goes, ominously, there is no schedule I can find starting today which gets me to 20M in 5 weeks (I wonder why?..). So I'm just going to follow Hal Higdon's Intermediate II schedule which I think has me running 14M by that Sunday. I'm going to try to be a bit more diligent about the cross training days - when I used Intermediate I last year I tended to take Mondays (cross training days) off as well as Fridays. I have a cross trainer so I might as well use it. Additionally, Hal's schedules don't include speedwork and while this suits me (I hate it and am bad at it and tend to get injured doing it) I could do speedwork on the crosstrainer which is much less impact and so get some of the benefit without the damage.. A thought, anyway..

So today - ha! - the schedule has me on for a rest day. Won't do that though, I'm going to do yesterday's 3M run. Hardly taxing, even for a slightly post-christmas / stress heavier, lazier me..

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Running like the moon is cyclic.
Sometimes we are all on, sometimes we are hidden, but we always come back.

Glad to hear that your son is doing well.

Sounds like you have a decent plan for the 20M... the best thing is that you can adjust it to your suiting and go from there.

One suggestion about speedwork. Do you have hills in your area? If you do, you might want to think about running some of the hills at Tempo speed on your speedwork out days. I would alternate weeks with the cross trainer to avoid burn-out of the hills.