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!
Some Magic Would Be Nice – Surrey Half Saturday
Today marks the first day of training for my upcoming half marathon, being run as part of the Surrey International World Music Marathon weekend. I haven’t run a half since June 2010 as I focused on 3 fulls, one ultra, and, now, adapting to heart-rate training. I guess the only thing I can really say about how I’m feeling is, “This should be interesting.”
I have only ever trained using one program’s methods – that of the Running Room. If you’re Canadian you know that RR is a bit of a Canadian institution. You might not be a fan, nor do you have to be, but when I was starting out in 2009 they were the closest running store offering a learn to run program. I liked their promotion of walk/run training (all long runs are done as 10+1s) and have found some great friends because of them. However, I dropped out of the half clinic last summer due to never being able to make the runs and, to be honest, not really clicking with the instructor. You might remember that I also dropped the full clinic this past spring once I had the lactate test because I simply couldn’t keep up. So where do I go this year?
Well, I’m not “going” anywhere. This is a purely self-directed training cycle as it didn’t make any sense to drop out of a 3rd clinic! I am really excited to be following the training program found in Train Like A Mother by Dimity McDowell and Sarah Bowen Shea, who also penned Run Like A Mother. It’s titled HALF-MARATHON: Own It and I have high hopes for it! It follows the standard training regimen of long runs, easy and recovery runs, hills, tempo runs, and speed work. I think the reason I want to do it is that it’s just different enough from what I’ve been doing to seem new. I get the principles already so I’m not intimidated, but they are much more specific than what I have been doing so it will be challenging. What I also like is that they include what zones I should be running in and, since I’ve already got my numbers (you could do it by perceived effort if you haven’t tested), I should be able to achieve those runs with (hopefully) few problems.
Another thing that is different for me is that my long runs are moving to Saturdays! I have been a firm Sunday LSD runner since I began running. However, with work commitments and Colin also wanting to do long runs, Saturdays just seemed like a better fit. I’ll be getting out really early or going out in the evening depending on my shifts, but at least it will keep it interesting!
As you can see from the post title this will be a regular blog feature. Surrey Half Saturday will cover how my training is going, what I was up to during the week (training log style), and any other stuff going on with the event. Please check back each week to follow along, give me encouragement or a kick in the butt, and let me know how your running is doing as well. If you are running any of the Surrey races tell me so we can catch up on race day!
Love My Runners 