Surrey Half Saturday: A Tale Of Two Weeks

You may have noticed that after all the hype of a Saturday feature post detailing my half marathon training there was a distinct lack of a post last week. That was due to an EPIC FAILURE on my part to do any running other than my long run on Saturday the 7th. So, sorry for the hiatus, but there you go.

This week has been marginally, but not much, better. As you can see I added a run to the week. Scheduling should be interesting since I’m currently training at work for a full-time position starting in September. There’s going to be a lot of evening running in my future!

Saturday 7th: 16km long run. I won’t be publishing paces simply because I’m heart-rate training and am still uber-slow. Let’s just leave it that I felt like I was plodding along the whole time. I left at about 9, but it wasn’t early enough as it got really hot by the time I was on my way home. It also didn’t help that the program I’m following called for the 3 middle km to be at tempo pace. I hit my paces just fine, but due to the heat and exertion I just couldn’t get my heart-rate down fast enough after that. I had to walk for a good km to make it somewhat normal. I think if it calls for that again I’ll just do that portion at the end.

Wednesday 11th: My sister-in-law and I decided that we wanted to run together in the morning. Unfortunately (for us) her husband had to be at work early so we had to set out at an ungodly hour of the morning. I was confused when my alarm woke me up at 4:45am, but I got up, dressed, and headed out for our 5:20am run. We ran a short 3km loop around her neighbourhood before she headed home. Since Colin wasn’t even getting up until 7am I took the chance to get in my run for the day. I ran firmly in zone 2 (a no-no, but I wanted to run with someone) with Marie. I can’t do that too often since that’s what got me in this mess to begin with! After I left her I picked up the pace to zone 3 and ran another 3km at tempo pace. Felt weird since I’ve been so focused on zone 1 running for the last few months. When I got to cooling down I did part of our original loop again. A gentleman out for a bike ride said, “Good for you,” as he rode by – I guess he thought I was just a beginner since I was going so slowly! Wasn’t too keen on whatever was rustling around in the bushes and got lost in her housing complex, but finally made it back to the car with about 7km done for the day.

Saturday 14th: 19km long run. Well, that’s what was on the schedule. It turned out to be very hot today so I changed up my plan. I originally was going to have Colin drop me off 19km from home and I’d run there. However, it made more sense to not be in the blazing sun so I ran from home and got in 15.59km. As I said on Facebook, I’m stupidly proud of this as I ran in my Vibram Five Fingers.

That’s it for this week – I won’t be posting next Saturday as I will be running the Ragnar Northwest Passage relay!