4 Weeks to Toral de los Vados (2005)

[Riazor Blue]

Yesterday I paid my 18 euros, sent off the application form and booked the hotel. Toral de los Vados, here I come.

Last Sunday was Armed Forces Day here in Spain. This year the King Juan Carlos, Queen Sofia, Prince Felipe de Asturias and Princess Letizia came to La Coruña to inspect the troops. The Prince and Princess first met in La Coruña whilst Letizia was reporting on the Prestige disaster, she was a journalist and news reader for RTVE. I wonder if they had time to revisit room 314 in the Hotel Atlantico. All week us plodders on the seafront have had to put up with ultra fit squaddies out for a gentle jog blazing past, leaving us to eat their dust. Apart from that it was nice to see the aircraft carrier Principe de Asturias with six of it’s possible 24 harriers and four helicopters in the port. There were also it’s two accompanying patrol boats. By all accounts the Harriers made a bit of a racket on Sunday morning on the fly past, but I wouldn’t know because I was in Betanzos.

It was a hard course in Betanzos, you’re either going uphill or you are going down. There is not too much level ground in this half marathon. It’s a nice course though, passing through the town centre then out along one shore of the Ria de Betanzos, crossing over to return on the other bank. As mentioned this was my last race before Toral, but given the terrein, I wasn’t sure how to pace myself. In the end I went on how I felt, now and again if I was breathing too hard taking a peek at the HRM. I actually took things fairly easily for most of the race because I had forgotten where the hills were. It was only in the last five or six kilometers that I pushed myself, knowing that it was more downhill than up. There were no distance markers either, we passed a driks station where the guy told us that we had run 10 km, but that was all.

Given the toughness of the course, and that I didn’t run too hard I was well pleased, not to say surprised, to stop the watch on 1:27:19. All of which gives me a bit of a problem for Toral. What would my time have been on a flatter course? Or if I had pushed a little harder? Those conversion tables tell me that 1:27 should convert to between 3:02 and 3:04 for a marathon. I’ve got a week more of hard training before a three week taper aswell. I cannot help thinking that 3:02 is very close to 2:59:59, that mythical time that puts one in the same hour as proper runners. OK, Bekele is at the short end of two hours and I’m aspiring to be at the other, but we’d still be 2 hours and…. But a sub 3 sounds bloody hard, I think I’d be better off aiming for a more achievable 3:05 or something. Even that sounds hard. So here I am with my dilemma. Sense tells me to aim for 4:20 per kilometer, but the heart says to go five seconds quicker and try for that 2:59. Death or glory and all that. Sheer stupidity more like, pipe dreams, I’ll be lucky (and very pleased) to get round in sub 3:15, which would give me a good for age in London.

Enough speculation.

This week is a toughie. Bob reckons that I need to run a 25 miler this Sunday. We’ll have to see if I can manage such a beast of a training run. I bet Bob didn’t have to run 25 miles of training run on asphalt. The schedule called for 99 kilometers this week, but Monday’s gentle 6 never happened due to time constraints. Today’s 8 km happily did happen, in bright sunshine at lunchtime. So the rest of the week looks like this:

Wednesday: 5 km warm up, 6 X 200m with 400m recoveries, 4 km cool down.
Thursday: 8 km @ 150 bpm.
Friday: 4 km warm up, 5 X 1600m @ 180 bpm, 4 km cool down.
Saturday: 8 km @ 150 bpm.
Sunday: 40 km any way I can manage to do it.