4 Weeks Out
It’s weird. I don’ have any real idea if my fitness has improved since Porto. It should have because I’m training based off a 2:57 marathon and hitting paces, but I don’t feel I have any hard evidence - like a workout comparison from my last build. Did three weeks of very little training put me back? I don’t know. I guess I’ll find out soon enough. In my mind, holding a 4:15 pace doesn’t seem as scary as it did last time. I believe that I can do this. I watch videos of the sub 3 groups from previous Manchester Marathons and the pace looks… slow? Everyone looks like they’re jogging. It doesn’t feel as big a deal as it was to me last summer, and yet, I have still only ran 3:09.
I want to tick off this milestone but I’m aware that I’m only human. I don’t have a high Vo2 max, I’m heavy for a runner, I’ve only been road running for 10 months.
The key, I think, is to relish the process of improving - no matter what that training yields in competition. Enjoy the race, soak it in. If it’s a pb, be thankful. If it isn’t, go back to work. It’s the only way I know how to operate.
This week has been a solid week of training. I book-ended my last blog talking about Mondays run, which was great. Tuesday was recovery, meaning HR at 133bpm at most. Wednesday was a session.
We have a 20 mile tune up race on Sunday, so Wednesday wasn’t supposed to be crazy. The 6x3 session I was originally set was changed to 3x8 mins at 3:50 per k of 2-4 mins recovery. I don’t remember exactly why, but it had something to do with me complaining that I needed to not back off this week, since I’d already lost so much time.
It went well. My recovery has been surprisingly good over the past week. Strangely, I’ve not been feeling the overwhelming fatigue that comes at this stage of marathon prep, although I suspect it’s down to the slightly reduced mileage as of late. This week will be a total of 57 miles - 10 miles shy of the typical weeks I was doing before getting ill and dealing with my rusty tendon.
Thursday was an easy 8. Friday was a recovery 6. HR at 125bpm avg. I’m writing this on Friday afternoon and honestly, I’m not ravenously hungry, but I know I need to increase my carbs over the next day in prep for Sunday.
The Hullavington 20 is an undulating road event, designed for those peaking for Manchester and London. The idea is to run at marathon pulse. It’s basically a training run where we get to practice drinking out of cups and we get to run a different route than we would from home.
Sunday: Hullavington 20.
A typically windy race day morning. It’s gotten to a point where I’ve come to accept this as the norm, but the skies were clear and the air was cool. I decided to wear a non-plated shoe since I just don’t get on with the metaspeed sky+ - if anything, I feel I have to work harder in this shoe. So I laced up my favourite ASICS Superblasts.
The last time I ran further than 18 miles was back in November, plus this course has nearly 300m of climbing, so I had no expectations for this day other than to run at a HR of 160 and finish in one piece.
The gun went off and I ran easy for the first mile or so, going by feel and nothing else. Because we didn’t have a proper warm up, I wanted to use the first 10-12 mins to find a rhythm. 4:15 and 4:12 for the first two kilometres felt like I was jogging. Then came the first hill. These were not short hills you could run quickly over whilst barely affecting pace, they were steep and they were long! I moved up them as quickly as I could without allowing my HR to creep up to threshold. If it came close I would slow right down. Still, the first climb knocked me back to a 4:31k - not bad in hindsight. The paces stayed between 4:06 and 4:15 barring the big climbs and, overall, I felt strong. I saw a girl being paced by a couple of guys up ahead. I tried to stay fairly close as I’ve never run with a group before, but they inched further and further away as the miles ticked by. I was by myself pretty much for the first 11 or 12 miles. Maybe longer. I started to hear some feet tapping faintly behind me somewhere after the half way point of the race, the noise growing louder and louder as, finally, the young guy and girl caught up and overtook me.
The girl stayed with me for a few hundred metres, explaining that she had been on the guy’s heels up to this point, but he was too strong and she couldn’t maintain his pace any longer. For me, he seemed to be running at the pace I wanted to be, so I locked onto his heels and silently congratulated myself on being able to hang with someone who was clearly fit and strong. I’d stay with him for as long as I could. After a couple of miles, the girl who had been hanging on to me apparently picked up a second wind and quickly passed me and the guy I was tailing. As I looked down at my watch, I realised that the 4:08-4:10 k’s we had been holding had dropped back to 4:15’s. It felt almost wrong to believe I could push past him, but I did, catching up again to the girl ahead and the woman from earlier who was being paced by the two guys. Apparently they were going faster than they should have and she ended up having to drop back.
The three of us pushed on for the final few miles until, during the last mile, the girl who disappeared early into the race with her pacers, started losing speed. She congratulated me as I passed by and I remember thinking that seeing a person like me stumble past must be quite disheartening ( I believe she had won the 2023 edition of the fell race Holly took part in last weekend). I really worked to finish strong and came over the line in 2:16:29 - an average pace of 4:14 (quicker than marathon pace) with an average HR of 159.
Honestly, I felt so happy. I always expect to blow up. This must be the first race I’ve completed where I exercised restraint and it paid off. I always talk about never having sessions or races that serve as confidence boosters - today was a BIG boost.
3 weeks. I just need to survive 3 weeks.