Two Great Runs

As I posted previously, I ran a 10k race at the weekend and made a real effort to get a PB (which I did).  This left me pretty tired on Sunday after the race and I could still feel it on Monday (which was a rest day).  So when I looked at the schedule for this week and saw that Tuesday was an 8 mile run (including 6 miles of fartleks in 55 mins) and Wednesday was a 6 miler (also in 55 minutes), I wasn’t sure I would be able to hit the pace targets for these runs and was not looking forward to them.

As it turns out, I have had two great runs.  The fartlek run I started with great trepidation as I prefer short intervals.  I planned to mix up it up by doing short fartleks for the first two miles, followed by longer intervals for the second two miles, and then back to short ones for the last two.  The long intervals were hard and I dropped off the pace on my miles splits on these.  However, I made up for it on the short intervals and completed the fartlek session in 54 minutes!

The 6 miler in 55 minutes also had me worried – this pace (9m10s per mile) is only marginally slower then the pace I ran for the 6.2 miles of the race on Sunday and that was hard.  I chose a route that has some long steep up hills (as I seem to like up hills) and set out hoping to keep close to the pace.  As it turned out, I burned up the miles and was about 3 minutes ahead when I hit mile 5.  I took it easy for the last mile (mindful of the 10 mile run tomorrow night) but still finished in 53 minutes.  I know that I could have gone all out for the last mile as I still had plenty of strength left and I would probably have beaten my 10k PB from the weekend!

These two runs have really boosted my confidence as two weeks ago I don’t think I could have achieved the targets.  I put this down to a few things:

• My overall fitness is really improving – I guess training 5 times a week for 10 weeks will do that!
• I have got over a slight illness that has been bugging me for a few weeks – my resting heart rate has dropped about 10% in the last week: a sure sign that my body was not right
• I have been focusing really hard on taking on enough water during the day
• I have been using a recovery drink after every run in the last week to replace the glycogen in my muscles straight after my run has finished

Knowing that the things I have been doing have been making a tangible difference, I can now head into the last 6 weeks of training feeling really good!