The Road To Redemption Part 4

Greetings and long time no hear. I hope all your training is going well, especially if any of you are running a spring marathon.

Apart from a couple of light colds and the effects of long haul travel (more of that later) my buildup for the Daegu International Marathon on April 6 has been going well. I seem to be progressing in the right way; I feel I am right where I need to be; and am confident of having a good race on the big day. But there are still just over 7 weeks to go, however going into the specific phase of training the "juices" are starting to flow and am really excited about what lays ahead.

As I write this blog, I am having an easy week having just returned to Korea from the  United Kingdom. Last week was my biggest so far and went very well. Having no distractions certainly helped and the incessant rain didn't sem to give me problems. The United Kingdom has been bombarded by record storms for weeks; fortunately  West Wales where I stayed wasn't too badly affected. Anyway this is how it went.

Week Commencing February 3rd

Monday: 60 minutes easy (Previous day was a paced 75 minutes incorporated in a 90 minute long run)

Tuesday: 88 minutes mainly on forest trails  

Wednesday: 5 x 5 minutes hard with 1 minute recoveries

Thursday: 2 hours along River Thames towpath in London

               (According to my GPS, I ran just under 25 km/15 miles)

Friday: Rest day

Saturday: The weather gods really dished it out to me today: rain, strong swirling winds, hail and thunder.  

               Inspite of this I ran 95 minutes with 80 minutes paced.

Sunday:  3 hours 50minutes on a hilly course. Purpose of running two long runs back to back is to train the body 

              to run on low glycogen. This will allow me to  handle the demands of the final 10k/6 miles of a marathon.

              Lets not forget that a marathon doesn't really start until after 32k/ 20miles, so if you don't prepare your body  

              with this in mind chances are that you will be considerably disadvantaged when it comes to running the 

             final kilometres.

 To summarise I wanted a good endurance week, and following it with a recovery week to coincide with recovering from the effects of jet lag. When I comence the specific training I will feel invigorated. This is something that many runners can't grasp; your body actually gets stronger when it recovers not when you are training. These down periods should never be discounted.