Running Training 28/11/2016 – 04/12/2016

Week 9….where are the weeks going!  I had so much I wanted to get done before Christmas and time is slipping away.  This week the routine was disrupted a bit but not as much as last week, we got all the key sessions in we needed to and finished strong with an awesome 18 mile long run.

Monday

Tempo run….I went back to and older hilly route that I haven’t done for a few months… for me its a leg strength builder as you are pushing super hard up hills and flying down them.  To my delight I managed to clock a PB on the route of over 30 seconds!

Tuesday

13.1 easy spin on the bike

Wednesday

12 x 400m reps!  Did a great warm up, rep session and cool down….the pleasing thing was that thanks to James, we worked out the difference in pace & HR compared to our last 400 session 6 weeks ago and the averages have dropped.  His dropped moreso than mine but I managed to get my average pace down from 1.22 to 1.18.  It must be said though that the session started slowly with the cold night, clocking the first few at 1.22 & 1.21…as we hit the 5th rep I managed to get a consistent run of 4 x 1.18 done and peaked at a 1.16, which is awesome!

Thursday

Workout day!  I do not normally do a workout straight after a rep session and I had no intention of doing that either….I stepped out of my front door ready for a nice easy run and thought it was too cold to run slow… so thought I would aim for a threshold pace….after 3 miles I realised I got quicker….6.41, 6.33, 6.27 so just thought I would blast the last mile in 5.59 and finish on a small but effective 4 mile progressive run.

Friday

Rest

Saturday

Rest

Sunday

Long run!  Today I just went out fully fueled and ready for anything.  I decided before I left I just wanted to see how far I could run comfortably and although the last mile was a bit of a struggle home, I managed to clock a solid 18 miles, the highest so far of this winter training block.  The key thing about today was the ave pace was 7.48 and the ave HR was 148, which is insanely low compared to what it has been.  This all goes to show that training is working very well!

Summary

Delighted with this week, especially the long run.  The long run showed me on the stats that i’m really improving my running efficiency and that these rep & workout sessions are paying off hugely.  Two more weeks to go until we have a week off for Christmas!