Medium Long Run: 14km

This is the view at the top of Cleveland Park in Ealing looking back across North and West London. In the hidden distance the A40 hurries to the City and away to Oxford. The houses are large and proud. The park represents a sincere incline away from the River Brent, a polluted and opaque affair, a sorry tributary to the pumping vein of the Thames. By this point I had completed some 13km of my run and paused to capture the scene. On my way up the hill a man slipped and fell and was picked up by some concerned dog walkers. Embarrassed, he picked himself up and continued. I watched him run out of the park and having caught my own breath, pulled out my phone and took the picture.

I was in no mood to run in the morning. The was no real sense in recovery from the previous days hiatus and it was everything I could do to get myself to the point of beginning the run. My legs felt weighted and I felt aware of them more than I have done in recent times. The ground was wet but the skies were clear. Two cars countered each other belligerently in the narrow recesses of the road, each refusing to move. I began.

Irritatingly, there is still no data to show you given the very notable absence of my ANT + stick and so you will have to take my word for this excursion. I completed 14.3km at a 4:55min/km pace and felt every footstep. There were countless times I wanted the run to be over and in many circumstances found myself willing my psyche to the end of the road, the next tree or the top of the hill. One more kilometre. One more kilometre. My average HR was 151bpm with an average cadence of 92spm. The kilometre splits (min/km), I have hand written below, so you better fucking read them

1. 5:00
2. 4:55
3. 4:55
4. 4:47
5. 4:53
6. 5:04 (big hill man, you had to be there)
7. 4:44
8. 4:49
9. 4:52
10. 4:55
11. 4:56
12. 4:56
13. 5:13 (big hill man, you had to be there)
14. 4:55
15. Only 260m (in 1:15) 

So given how tired I was, not a bad pace for me overall. I obviously joke about the hills but they clearly continue to hit me hard. On lap 13, I genuinely cannot convey how difficult it was to put foot in front of successive foot. I didn’t fall but I would have happily ended the run at the park’s summit, such was my exhaustion. To date, there are many many runs that I have not wanted to do. There are many many runs I would have happily ended prematurely and walked the remainder of the distance. There are many runs, like today, where every step almost required a conscious battle to progress from A to B. As it happens and despite all of this, there are no runs I have regretted on completion and as I sit here now, I am conscious that every run only makes me stronger now matter how weak I feel whilst in it’s oblivion.

*Addendum. The Garmin is now connected. Rejoice in the data that is the Strava application.

Parkrun No. 10 Gunnersbury Park

This is the backdrop awaiting you as you arrive in Gunnersbury Park. 6 towers furnishing the southern most point, arms up to the sky. I don’t know what purpose they serve but they have been there ever since I can remember on my earliest visits to the park. One of them may be a Sega building but I can’t be sure. Does anyone still play the megadrive? As you approach them, the rumble of traffic increases and in such lazy and unfurled grounds it’s easy to forget that the M4 comes into existence here in it’s storming relentless passage to Wales. It is quite abundantly, a classic example of life in London; we play under the smog of traffic that surrounds us.

After yesterday’s yuletide 5km personal best in southampton, today was to be a gentle affair. The plan had been to do the ParkRun in Gunnersbury as a warm up and then retire to it’s mid town neighbour for a series of 10x1km repetitions at 10km pace. That was the plan anyway.

As soon as I left the house, I knew this wasn’t going to be easy or even possible. As I cycled through South Ealing, the wind reminded me that even though South England might not be flooded, it wasn’t going to let me get away without a slap in the face. My legs, stiff, heavy and unrecovered grumbled beneath me. They’re never particularly happy with most things, I didn’t expect any different now.

The start. That lady looks a little un-impressed. He definitely forgot to put the seat down.

I ran the park run at a gentle-ish effort. The 5:00min/km I was aiming for quickly became 4:40min/km odd and I registered a final time of 23:34. I would link the Strava data here but, pleb that I am, have lost my ANT+ stick and so have been using my iPhone instead. Looking at the splits, they couldn’t be more dissimilar to my watch and so there’s not point in commenting further. The race itself was seasoned with a good helping of wind throughout, with little to no crowd cover. The field itself was only of 172 odd patrons and so there weren’t too many running groups.

The end. Some chap beginning to funnel

Just some pictures of the end funnel there. There was quite a big bridging pause between the <25 and >25 runners in my mind. Not sure as to what the reason for this discord was. As I left, some runners were still trickling in. I have to admit, I didn’t give any encouragement as I was more concerned about the repetitions awaiting me.

By the time I arrived in Walpole Park I felt tired and the decision had been made, with extreme guilt to reduce the workout to only 5 repetitions. This guilt was consolidated by the circulating runners whirring their way across the park’s perimeter. Clearly lots of folk trying to lighten the Christmas day dietary damage. I locked my bike up and began the workout which is here (and remember this is iPhone data which is about as useful as taping a cat to my wrist and getting it to pace me).

Needless to say, I was fucking dying. If you look, and you really don’t need to, the pace drops off incrementally and by the final rest I have succumbed  to walking. The pace was supposed to register around the 4:30min/km mark but it was way off and I think on average it would have been closer to 4:35 or so. I was disappointed to have performed so poorly and perhaps the smarter of you might have suggested leaving this workout out altogether. Personally I think that you need to identify your running needs and a big weakness of mine is running whilst fatigued. Clearly we can’t all have the burst of acceleration of a certain Mo Farah but it would be nice to be able to hold a reasonable pace with out flapping like a fish, long out of water, being prodded by an idiot toddler.

I leave you with the new improved Walpole Park.

This was what I previously and lovingly called Paedo lake (please note, I don’t know if any bonafide paedo-ing went on here). There was a conglomerate of bushes that had once stood in quiet contemplation around this water whilst all sorts of naughtiness went on under the drooping arms of the English Ivy canopy. Basically I think this was the place to be if you either wanted a little bit of drugs from that bloke Trevor or to lose your middle class virginity. I did neither of those, in case you were wondering. Still haven’t.

Toodles.

 

5km Parkrun: Festive PB

Merry christmas folks. I was working last night and so the evening didn’t seem particularly festive. I spent a good part of the evening trying to stop a bleeding nose from bleeding, which is often both a lot more annoying and difficult than you might think. The nose is a beautifully designed organ, fantastic for its purpose, but not conducive to an examination under a headlight at 8pm on Christmas Eve. Serious design flaw.

The rest of the evening was spent thinking about running today’s 5km Parkrun which I had intentionally marked as PB potential. I wanted 21 minutes ideally, a swooping 40 seconds faster than my current PB – which sounds easy to do (40 seconds is nothing right?), but in the last kilometre of the race when all you want to do is stop and take a big big BIG fucking breath, it really isn’t that straightforward. Not that that’s lost on supporters in races who remind you to keep going. Don’t get me wrong, I love the support and its always fantastic to have a good crowd and their bleary eyed mildly condescending support, but if you’re the kind of person that shouts keep going, you are a terrible person and there is a special place in hell for you. It is right up there with dog walkers that can’t control their dogs. OF COURSE I’M GOING TO KEEP GOING DID YOU THINK THAT I WAS IN IMMINENT DANGER OF STOPPING THATS THE POINT DONT YOU GET IT I HAVE TO FINISH THIS FUCKING RACE OTHERWISE THERES NO POINT IN STARTING AND SO BY DEFINITION I WILL KEEP GOING GOD.

Ahem.

The pace I needed was 4:12min/km which would have brought me tidily in at 21 minutes. I knew that this was a tall order and so I decided that anything shy of the 21″40 PB would be acceptable.

I met up with two of my strava buddies to begin the festive race with. Ironically there were less Santas today then on the Parkrun last week. Suppose all the work’s done by now I guess? The venue for today’s run was Southampton, which generally supplies a good event. I was told once that it was in fact the third largest Parkrun in the UK but I don’t have any evidence or numbers for that statement. It probably comes from the same people who tell you that you’ll catch a cold if you go out after a shower.

Southampton is a nice place to Parkrun. There are 4 main courses which are largely similar and are based around a proud and defining hill at the north end of the park. The route is paved throughout and only at the very end do you cut onto grass for the finish funnel. Volunteer support is aways seemingly plentiful and people look like they enjoy their lives, which judging by yesterdays queues in Tesco, not many people do. In today’s course (C) this was to include 2 laps of the aforementioned hill. Now this hill is not particularly steep and I believe overall its gradient comes to 3% or so, so nothing that makes you whimper in terror. That said, it does go on. The climb each time is a kilometre and builds from the point just after the so called Flats. It continues to the very top of Coronation Way and true to the gradient, is mostly gentle in incline. The first 300m or so are subject to an insidious change of gradient, which to the eye, almost seems flat and as you begin to catch your breath it really begins to frustrate you. You know there’s a proper hill coming but you’re tired already. The “actual” hill then kicks in 2 places towards the end, I slightly longer steep part, succeeded almost immediately by a shorter one. Both kicks are interspersed by a short flat segment which I have described as flat but is still in incline. In short, this hill is a bastard and you do it twice.

Here is the workout and I have enclosed the pace chart from Garmin below. A few points – the green line is the elevation which seems perfectly benign but the graph is lying to you. Clearly that pace chart has never run up that hill before. Also my Garmin was playing up today quite considerably and chose to screw up my times which has upset me no end. Strava now thinks I didn’t PB and so as far as I’m concerned, it can go and fuck itself.

Here are the splits.

I’m not going to comment on these particularly – the 4th split represented the bulk of the 2nd loop of the hill and quite evidently it hit me hard there. Looking at pace trends, this is similar to other times I have run Southampton. Aaron my friend who was running with me gave me great advice to drop pace but maintain a similar effort going up the hill and so part of this was intentional. What this meant was that as I turned the northerly most corner down towards the final kilometre I felt I had something (not very much) but something left to churn for the sprint home.

In sum, I am happy. My official final time was 21:28, watch time 21:25 so I’ll go with Parkrun. I ranked 50th overall of 351 runners which was pleasing. There’s something genuinely and morbidly satisfying about passing people in a race. It’s a right bastard when they overtake you again though. That said, the run was as good as I could have achieved in the circumstances. It was on the back of a full week running and some tiring preceding sessions and no taper. On a flatter course, with a bit of a wind down on the weekly miles I am sure that 21 minutes is there for me. I’m only 28 seconds away and hey, that’s easy.

10km, Kew and the Wind

It was windy today. The weather forecast suggested a 21mph wind WSW, which according to the Beaufort Scale is a Category 4 wind and a fresh breeze. I don’t know who described these scales. There was nothing fresh about the breeze today. As soon as I left the house, I was hit by a sucker punch of wind that had probably originated from a fart in Guernsey. This persisted throughout the first 6km or so of my run, culminating on Kew Bridge. It was a miserable affair. I hate the wind.

Today was supposed to be a recovery run but I decided to decorate each kilometre with 200m strides at 800m. See, I like the idea of fartleks but I lack the intuition to do them. If I am running and I have to randomly assign myself a period of running harder, then I assure you, as day follows night, I will not run any harder. Therefore regulated strides work well for me. I know they are coming, I fucking hate them, but I do them anyway because I hate giving up on things. So that’s what happened.

Here is the workout and the pace chart below.

The pause was at the junction of Ealing Road as it passed underneath the A4/M4. It wasn’t intentional. In fact it was a real ball ache. I hate standing and waiting for traffic to pass. However, not being run over is contingent with life and so I let this pass.

This is the map of the route if you are interested.

It’s actually a fairly nice route. There’s some racy stuff on the A406 back up to Ealing and the traffic just never seems to quieten down but it’s a relatively nice route. It’s actually well worth extending the loop through Kew which is beautiful to run through. For the point of the 10km today it was excess to need and so I reigned it in.

The strides went well overall. The wind was pretty relentless as I headed southwards and by the first 5km I was honestly contemplating cutting them to only 5 repetitions. As I came back up Gunnersbury Avenue, my legs were really feeling stiff and I was pretty tired. I have no idea how I managed to make it back into Ealing, I was puffing like a steam engine.

All in all it was a good run, coming in as my 3rd fastest 10km which is no bad thing. I feel the strength is beginning to build and hopefully the strength in combination with a stronger aerobic base will serve me well. We’ll see. Christmas Day Parkrun tomorrow.

Oh yeah, merry Christmas Eve!

2 Mile Intervals: Lammas Park

It’s a resplendent morning here in West London. The sun has crept out from the clouds and the wind has settled enough that the day can be considered a pleasant one. There is genuinely, nothing quite like a morning run under the sun.

Today the plan was to undertake 3 x 2mile intervals with a 3:00 minute break in between. In honesty, this was supposed to be a 2:30 break but after the first 2 miles I realised that clearly wasn’t going to happen and so there was a mid work out addendum.

I chose Lammas Park in Ealing to undertake the splits. I have to concede it is one of my least favourite parks in Ealing and I have always been drawn to the gentle middle class pleasantries of it’s bloated neighbour, Walpole Park. I have to stress, it’s not a particularly bad park at all, I just never particularly warmed to it. My older brother does seem to enjoy it a little more than me and so on family runs I have been dragged through it and I suppose it’s not so bad. Importantly, it doesn’t have that air of disownment that the once impressive Gunnersbury Park seems to shoulder. True, it hosts the Gunnersbury Parkrun as some form of consolation but it does feel somewhat broken and forgotten, sitting as it does, beneath the roar of M4. Along the broken paths and the murky lakes, even the dog walkers leave the dog shit where it lands.

I digress. I chose Lammas Park for the principle reason that it equals a mile in its perimeter, no less. This is very helpfully marked by the 100m distance posts that circle in an anti-clockwise manner from the main (Walpole side) entrance to the park. Here is the Strava segment for the Lammas Mile.

It’s actually remarkably suitable for the repetition. There is a slight incline from the SW corner to northerly most point but it is not enough to compromise your interval. I should add, I felt it, but it was manageable. Also the middle waist where it seems to pinch is also quite sharp as you turn for the final 300m. There were some yummy mummies (they weren’t that yummy) doing some odd lunge type activities on that very corner which wasn’t odd at all. They kept this up for the entirety of the workout.

Here is the pace chart for the workout.

The pace was maintained relatively suitably. I aimed for a 4:30 min/km split for the first 2 intervals and then a 4:35-4:40 for the last one. The overall times were 14:05, 14:08 and 14:34, all of which I will live with. I managed to keep trotting for the first rest interval but after the second one, it was everything I could do to not collapse on the floor, so I walked. I’m not a big fan of walking during interval workouts but I was completely spent, it was a necessity.

Overall I was happy with the outcome. I was disappointed to feel that I needed to extend the rest periods and walk during one but I completed the workout and that should count more than anything. Overall, the run paced  at about 4:45 min/km which is satisfactory at my current level. A 10km recovery run awaits tomorrow. See you Anon.

MLR with the elder brother.

I think I am more or less on course with the running now. I am about a third of the way into my training for the Brighton Half Marathon (which is on 28th February 2016) and I am feeling pretty good. I don’t think feeling good is particularly synonymous with objective improvement but I’m not injured, I’m running, things are going well.

Today I ran 14km in West London with my older brother as part of my MLR (medium long run). I’ve added the link to my Strava so you can see it. He ran the first 1okm (to a PB I should add) with me and I finished off the final 4km on my own. I do love running through London. I am by some considerable measure, an urban runner. Nothing quite inspires or invites me to run as the turning of road upon road. It’s an amalgamation of the history of the city, the buildings in ascension, the feeling of something significant happening; yesterday today and forever more. The space is bombarded by the blitz of relentless human endeavour. I’ve enjoyed many runs through fields and countryside but they never get me quite like urban running does. There’s only so many things you can do with a horizon.

I’ve added the pace chart from said run below.

We kept a nicely gentle and comfortable pace of about 5:30min/km in the entirety of the joint run. The suggested pause just after 9km isn’t at all, merely a venture over a bridge and British Rail. I think he had begun to turn by this point as the pace had begun to drop off towards 6min/km. I continued onwards with the goal of keeping the pace of 5min/km for the final 4km. This more or less was achieved.

I’m getting to the point now where 5min/km is a fairly comfortable pace for me at distance. I’m probably teetering on the edge of my aerobic capacity. A venture toward 4:50 begins a tugging of breath and by 4:40 I am fully aware that I’m running.

4:40 is the intended goal pace for the Brighton Half. The goal time is 1″40. The current PB is a somewhat embarrassing 1″43. I feel I can do much better than that and hopefully now I should do, given that never before have I trained for a half marathon. There is something thoroughly depressing about watching 40 year olds cruise to 1″30 (I am 30 years old myself) whilst steam pours out of my ears. Happily, 4:45 should get me my goal time, but I am keen to arrive comfortably into the next time zone. I guess we’ll just have to see what happens.

2 mile intervals tomorrow in Lammas Park which I am looking forward to. I know, I’m a little strange.

What I talk about when I talk about running.

10 mile run in the Peak District

We’re going to get high and. listen to Miles (4)

We’re going to get high and. listen to Miles (3)