July Hibernation

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Did a short, 30-minute speed session today, just to gauge where I'm at and what I need to do from here. It's a bit tricky, because there aren't too many training schedules out there designed to cater for a half marathon mountain climb, so I'm having to make it up as I go along somewhat. The race organisers' official training program seems to be a rather simplistic "do lots of hill work", which is of course rather open to interpretation.

Anyway, today's brief fast stuff wasn't too bad, but neither was it brilliant. I did a 2.3km sprint session (2.3k being the distance of one of my old training runs around the block), in 12:50, which by recent standards isn't too bad, but it's way behind my PB of 10:46, set some three and a half years ago.

I also did some intervals, about which I shall say nothing more.

So, more speed work needed. Pretty essential really, because my hill work is very slow. I'm not sure how it works physiologically, but it does all seem to come together on race day somehow.

Actually, I've been thinking about this "why is race day often so much faster than your very best training day" question quite a bit lately. It's had me totally stumped. Oddly enough though, I've been reading Alan Bennett's fat tome "Writing Home", and whilst he certainly isn't a runner, he wrote something that I thought was relevant:

[INDENT]

[INDENT][INDENT]The majority of people perform well in a crisis or when the spotlight is on them (ask any actor) - it's on the Sunday afternoons of this life when nobody is looking that the spirit falters". [/INDENT][/INDENT]

[/INDENT]

Bennett is also a great fan of Kafka, and so writes a lot of stuff about cockroaches and bank tellers, but he is a great student of human behaviour, and am sure he'd have some interesting stuff to say about the habits of we runners. But I think he'd say the wonder of long distance running wasn't so much the "triumph of human spirit over suffering" but more about the indignity of not performing in front of a crowd. Or something like that.

But I prefer the triumph of human spirit stuff. Bugger reality, let's just have some fun with it.

Five runs in six days - definitely having fun.