Monday, September 03, 2007

The Last Week of August, 2007

Not a bad week of 112 km. Nice and consistent with a decent run of some sort every day.

Mon: 10 km easy
Tue: 14 km lower aerobic
Wed: 17 km with 6 km easy, 5 km evaluation, and 6 km upper aerobic
Thur: 11.5 km easy (PM run home)
Fri: 16.5 km upper aerobic (AM before work) in 1:14
Sat: 13.3 km including 5 loops of a 700-m hill circuit
Sun: 30 km in 2:38

The cooler weather last week, especially Thursday to Saturday, meant that I had to (or could) run significantly faster for given heart rates. I enjoyed running around the hill circuit on Saturday and the cumulative effect of this run and Friday's quicker longish run made the legs feel heavy for yesterday's long run. I ran the whole thing in Yoyogi Park, which created its own , mainly mental, challenges (12 laps). However I persevered and got there in the end and was able to finish the last 10 km fairly strongly.

August ended on Friday leaving me with just over 400 km for the month. And today marks 12 weeks to Ohtawara Marathon. I think I've done a pretty fair job of laying a solid base on which to start adding some harder mid week aerobic runs. I don't really think I need to worry too much about specific speed sessions yet, but I might start adding little bits here and there to start getting the legs ready for some speedwork sessions towards the end of this month.

On my other blog I posted some pictures of the brew day on the 25th. My reference to it last week had some people thinking I was talking about homebrewing. It was a recipe I had first brewed at home, but this was most definitely not a home brew.

8 comments:

2P said...

Nice monthly total Steve - looking forward to following your journey to Ohtawara.

Ewen said...

It's just a home brew from a big home. How many kegs?

I won't complain about my 4 x 2.7k laps again! With that under your belt, how about Hadd's 25 laps of 200/200 fartlek for speedwork? Buy you a beer if you can run it in 42:30.

Stephen Lacey said...

Well, I have already run a half marathon on a track, 50 odd laps, so Hadd's 25 should be doable, if a little tough, especially with the constant change of pace. I'm pretty keen to give it a try some Wednesday night. So, were you thinking of something like 42 sec for the "on" 200 m and 60 sec for the "off" 200? I think I could almost do that. Or maybe 44 and 58, though it is questionable as to how slow is slow enough to recover. I feel that Hadd intends that you go quite slow...4:50/km is not exactly a light jog.

Tesso said...

112kms - I jealous ;-)

Its going to be so interesting to see the impact come marathon day. Can't wait.

Tesso said...

Argh ... I'm not I ...

Samurai Running said...

This good milage base has got to make a positive difference to your next marathon time, all other things being equal. And if you can manage that sort of effort for August the next two months or so you may be able to better that effort in the improved running conditions here during the "fall"!

So keep it up,don't fall, and enjoy the rest of your build up.

Ewen said...

The 200/200 doesn't sound that easy. At a 5k race pace of 18 flat, that's 43+ seconds for the fast 200s. 60sec for the recovery 200s? That gives you about 43 minutes for 10k. Maybe have a try over 5 laps one day to see if it looks like your HR is recovering enough in the slow 200s.

If this is mainly a biomechanical low lactate session, the 43 sec 200s are the important bit. You'd probably want to keep the average HR under 90%. I'm thinking about trying 150/200 for maybe 8k. The HR doesn't get up that high over 150m but I can still run at 5k race pace.

Stephen Lacey said...

Yes, Ewen, I am sure it is definitely a biomechanical speed without lactate accumulation run. Good idea to give it a go over a shorter distance first. I think I'll be doing my main training runs every morning from now on, so on the odd occasion that I can get to the track on a Wednesday evening I can use it for lower mileage efforts like that.