99min half, week 6: Taking stock

This week I was running through the park when a conker fell from a tree missing me by about a foot. My first thought was ‘that would have really hurt’ swiftly followed by ‘Oh crap, it’s nearly Autumn’.

The Great Eastern Run isn’t the only sporting event taking place in Peterborough in early October. The Palmerstone Arms (also known for being the finish line of my Iron Person) hosts a conker championships which has fallen on the same date as the half marathon in the past. And so the sight of horse chestnuts falling from a tree, while also making me consider running in a helmet in future, was a reminder that there’s not many weeks left of training. We’re half way, in fact. Which is as good a point as any to take stock of how things are going.

I’ve been cautious about my mileage because these days my job requires me to be able to run. An injury would not only mean no race, but no work either. I felt as though I’d done less miles in the past six weeks than I’d done in the build up to Cambridge, so I looked back over my Strava log to compare. (Bare with the stats, there’s an important point in a second.)

It turns out that in the first six weeks of Cambridge half training I averaged 28.3 miles a week Vs 30.3 for the first six weeks of this cycle. It’s not a big difference but it shows my perception was wrong.

I do think we can get too obsessed by numbers – miles run, minutes per mile etc – resulting in us not trusting the information that our body is telling us. Namely, ‘I’m tired and I need a rest’. But it’s also useful to have some hard evidence to look back on and inform our decisions, or to figure out where things might have gone wrong.

So whether you log them digitally or scribble them in a notebook or diary, it’s useful to have a record.

This week’s miles…

Treadmill workout: 4x 1 mile @ 5k pace, totalling 6 miles

Long run 13 miles

Tempo parkrun sandwiched by 2 easy miles either side

Easy 3 miles the morning after a beer festival

Total: 30 miles.