Winter training and off season events

After a slow start to off season training I was becoming more and more keen to get out in the cold and work on my running technique (as this felt as though it was going well it was the easiest to continue).

The good feeling I had were (maybe) a little premature as I have picked up a pig of a chest cold which I am struggling to shift completely. I persevered and ran the Tri-Anglia club 10k last weekend notching up a 34:30 for a 9.5k cross country route and felt I had a lot more in the legs (but not in the chest!)

I had previously entered the Norwich Half Marathon and decided to take the week leading up to it off swim training to try and shift the cold but unfortunately this had not left on the morning of the race. I was very close to backing out of the race but fortunately had agreed to go down with a friend of mine who was looking to run a similar time to me 1:18:00 (Karl Sherry).

The plan was to try and keep to a 6min mile pace all the way round but as the weather cleared I realised a number of other runners who Karl was running with were also looking to go off at that pace or a bit quicker - herein lied the problem, far to fast far too early!

Trying to keep with Karl among others (inc Andy Walpole) I was knocking off mile markers well under the 6min mark. I managed to keep under 6min mile average until about the 7th mile on 42:10 and new at that stage that I was going to struggle to keep the 6min pace for the rest of the race.

I ended up finishing on 1:22:16 which was way under the time I had hoped but as my fellow runners also posted slower times than expected by anything from 1-3 minutes I was a little more assured.

looking back at the race it was lack of distance training that caused the problems as my running style suffered during the second half of the race (and I can really feel this in the legs even today!) Reverting back to my Pre-HPU style was difficult to avoid and although I may have thought I was saving energy in a fatigued state the reality is that if I had stayed with the improved 'gravity assisted' style I had been practicing I would have saved a lot of energy and maintained momentum.

Going forward (once 100%) I am going to have to look at increasing some of my training runs/and training pace with a negative split mentality maybe??.