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Govember
I had a strange and vaguely disturbing dream last night, in which I got to the P2P and found to my delight that the last 10km really weren't very steep at all, and in fact were downright easy. I then woke up to the awful realisation that the dream was of course very far from the truth.
Knowing that I needed some serious last-minute hill work if I am to survive the race at all I took to my beloved treadmill today with the angle grinder (simultaneously my most favourite and yet most dangerous power tool) and several blocks of very solid wood to create a slope approaching something like the P2P climb. With the aid of some basic trigonometry I calculated the slope at 6.7%; a little above the P2P average but a little under the roughly 8% slope of the final kilometres. But it would have to do.
The plan was for an hour's run/walk on the endless treadie hill climb at a 10:1 ratio. The first ten minutes were awful, and the second repeat was awful too, but after that I began to feel much better and carried on reasonably well, albeit at a slow, careful, considered pace.
By the time I finished the fourth interval I was feeling much better about it all and knew I was going to do more than an hour. The walk break every ten minutes makes a heck of a difference on these hill climbs, as much mentally as well as physically. Knowing you only have a few minutes to go before a walk break does wonders for your mental endurance, and physically it's surprising how much you can recover in just sixty seconds.
In all I did 99 minutes worth of continual hill climb - not fast, and covering only 12.76km, but doing so relatively comfortably, especially given my lack of training lately.
Another one or two of these before race day will make quite a difference I think.
Track du jour: In honour of those walk breaks...
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Govember
