It’s strange really. After two weeks that included the “disruption” of Christmas and New Year, this was the week I managed have a wobble with my training plan!
Where possible in this training plan, I’m trying to get my miles in before the rest of the house is awake. That way I can run, eat, shower, help get the kids ready and still be out the door and to work on time. In general this has meant waking up about an hour earlier than normal with my alarm now going off at 5am most days. The problem I am having is readjusting my evenings to bring my bedtime forward an hour as well to offset this and ensure I get enough beauty sleep.
The week started fine with a well earned rest day on Monday. The kids were back at school for the first day after Christmas. It was probably a good thing this was my day off to allow for the extra hecticness.
Then Tuesday raised a tough question for me. The plan called for 8 miles in around 1h15-1h20. Originally I played with the idea of doing after work but this would have meant eating very late. In the morning I wasnt certain there would be time. Eventually I decided that it had to be done in the morning. I was out the door at 5:20am and was just about able to squeeze in. However, any runs longer than that could prove to be a struggle to schedule.
Then the wobble happened on Wednesday. I was down to do some intervals and everything was all ready to go. Just as I was about to go to sleep Tuesday night I set my alarm. I’m not quite sure what happened next. Either I didn’t set it correctly, or I slept right through it, but the first thing I knew was it was gone 6am and there was no time left to run and do all my other morning tasks. As I was working from home on Thursday I did consider dove tailing with my gym session but my arms needed some rest after so the run got chalked off the plan.
When I then got out on Friday it felt like an age since I had last laced up so was nice to have a brisk run on the plan to blast the cobwebs away.
Fortunately for me, come Saturday and my sons football team still hadn’t been scheduled a match. There was going to be training but this was just enough later to open up a perfectly sized parkrun window in my diary. They had amended the course slightly from New Years Day and whilst the sloppy sections put paid to some early thoughts of PB, I was pleased to get a sub 22 (and knock off another on parkrun Bingo at the same time!). That said, the new course does remind me of something…
Is that a #parkrun in your Pocket or are you just pleased to see me? #Pocketparkrun#ukrunchat #stravaart pic.twitter.com/uRn6VRVfPN
— Mike Heywood (@Mike_Heywood) January 11, 2020
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
Finally Sunday came and unlike recent weeks, the long run wasn’t planned to be that long. I was scheduled in to do a hard 10km. It was also my daughters birthday and I didn’t dare risk being out when she woke up so made the decision I’d push back the run to the evening. However, after a long day that started with a marshal shift at Junior parkrun and then saw us outside all day at the zoo, I was shattered. Given the 10km technically calls for a PB, by the time the kids were in bed, I’d made the call to push this run to the Monday morning instead.
It’s weird to end up missing two runs in the same week but I guess that this is something I knew would come. It isn’t realistic to hit every run on a training plan over 16wks as life will come along. For me the key 8s to take the chance to rest a little and really hit week 5 with gusto. After all, I’m now a quarter of the way to Manchester and (as I’ve heard all week on Chris Evan’s Breakfast show, this week was week one for those training for London!)
- Monday – Rest Day
- Tuesday – 12.52km @ 5:49 pace
- Wednesday – Overslept
- Thursday – Strength and Conditioning session
- Friday – 7.70km @ 5:20 pace
- Saturday – Pocket parkrun – 5km – 21:57
- Sunday – Rest Day
- Total – 25.22km
- Overall Total – 160.63km