This damn monkey won’t die.
I missed my two midweek runs, due to pre-Christmas busyness, work, and general tiredness. Not a disaster at this stage; I’ll count it as a step-back.
Sunday night I decided to pull on the heavy gear again and try slowing down by 2 mins per mile. My watch isn’t a clever running specialist, and it doesn’t have a backlight, and I run at night, so normally I know nothing about my pace until I get home. This is normally quite nice (and I’m therefore astounded when I complete a 5 mile circuit within 10 seconds of the previous attempt – it happens). So to have some idea of how I would be doing, time-wise, I made a note of the mile points on my regular 5 mile loop. I’ve been running this route for years, and I’ve never bothered to check those before – they’re interesting to know.
So with the fleecy layers on, and the BBC’s Material World podcast in my earphones, I set off at a more gentle pace than usual. My preconception was it would be ridiculously easy – two minutes per mile is a lot. And indeed, despite maintaining what I thought was a slow plod, I hit the first mile marker only 30 seconds slower than usual.
Oh no, I’m just too fit, I just can’t run this slowly.
I’ve
written before on the dull matter of my breathing patterns, so I won’t repeat myself. But at this point I decided to drop from 3/3, my normal steady pattern, down to 4/4, normally reserved for joint-conserving downhill drifts in long runs or half marathons. This seemed to do the trick – if I couldn’t catch my breath at 4/4 then I knew I was going too fast. After 5 miles I was pretty much on schedule, and feeling infinitely better than the previous week. I plodded on with no problems, and came home in an average pace of 1 min 45 sec slower than normal, equivalent to 4:40 marathon pace. That’ll do nicely.
Despite the 4/4 pace feeling very easy, after 7.5 miles I don’t think I’d have liked to have been running any harder than that, so I really do need to push the distance out to see if I can cope. One thing I did notice was that joint stress seemed higher (manifesting itself as a bit of hip pain during, and a sore ankle afterwards). I guess the load on your joints is more proportional to the number of footfalls than the distance covered. If that theory is correct, my joints may be subjected to 25% more load than normal – and a marathon might feel more like 30 miles.
Back at base, having peeled off the customary disgusting sweaty layers, I really felt fresh as a daisy, so cardio-wise it really was no problem. To my dismay I noticed that some small areas of my body were only encased in one layer of clothing – next week I should really add a scarf to max out the discomfort.
Only two more weekends left of the year (and decade…) – I must make them count, and get up to 10 miles.
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BB, thanks for your encouragement. I'm not sure if encouragement or a reality check is better for me at the moment. The strange thing is, as well as doing the crazy training, and dragging my dehydrated soul along Brighton prom for 5 hours, I will really have to crank up the fundraising effort. The whole project will be worth naught if it doesn't raise extra cash. Just running a marathon in a monkey suit for fun -- elevating common-or-garden torture to something the CIA would be proud of -- is pretty foolish. And I'm not sure I'm ready for the shameless self-promotion that entails.
BTW, a long while ago I did try out replacing gels with bananas for in-race refuelling. It's a nice idea, but a banana that's been bouncing around in a bumbag for an hour is not an appetising sight. Then again, maybe I could sew some banana pouches into the outfit...
