One Long Twitten: Steel City Half

[OutAlongTheRiver]

Wednesday 10 April ... update

How quickly these things seem to come round when they are every 4 weeks! The rhythm seems to be a week to get back into running after the HM. Feeling like you can do it again. A long run weekend. And then suddenly it's tapering ... maybe I'll get used to it!

Since last week, successfully completed planned runs (more below) and now on the taper. Which means yesterday was a tiny 3.5km outing. I picked a spot I didn't know a mile from work in central London and ran there and back. Kind of like running tourism! Found a pub a friend had told me about, and some nice hidden squares.

That's the upside of London running. The downside I experienced on Thursday. My aim was to run 3 x 1.5km tempo sets @4.45 per km, with 60s recovery between each. So I decided to loop around the outer path around Russell Square. Nice and green and relatively quiet with a few other runners to add to atmosphere. I quickly found that my apparent speed and my exertion of effort for each 1.5km set were way out of kilter. My watch was showing 5:15 per km or worse, while my body said this was closer to 4:30. Nonetheless I persisted and knackered after 7.5km reached my office again.

Sure enough, uploading the GPS data from Garmin to Runkeeper, the map showed that the tracker had registered me as running much smaller circles inside the grass area, not wider circles around the outer path. Rather than each park loop being scored as the actual 560m I had run around the edge, it was wrongly recorded as closer to 450m! So in practice I'd been exerting too much effort and running way too hard. Not in itself a bad thing, but when you are going for consistent accurate pacing, it's frustrating. The cause seems to be the London buildings which don't allow for such accurate GPS. Same effect as in Lincolns Inn Fields some weeks ago. I thought RS less affected. Still, it did mean I had had a good workout!

Saturday saw a return to Seaford Beach Park run - with the (gentle) 10km run over the downs from Southease down to Bishopstone, and with some mist still lingering the views were again occluded, but hinted at just how beautiful this run will be when the skies are clear.

At Seaford we decided to run at our own pace - and I set out strongly. With a slight fade mid-run and pick up at end, I clocked only my second ever sub-22 park run. This time 21:44. Completing that after a 10km over the hills, even if that had been done gently, felt good! Potential to hit sub-21 seems doable at some point ...

The Sunday was welcome return to Twittens with familiar faces, and excellent flat white.

Just 4 days now until HM date on Sunday. A short tempo run tomorrow, and then a gentle parkrun in Sheffield (the lovely Graves park which goes through a small animal petting zoo ...). And then it's 21k time from centre of Sheffield to my old school cross-country end point and back.

Will blog pre-run post setting out goal times - so can objectively see how it goes in practice!