It’s the start of a new week and the regime begins once again. I’ve done my morning run and my hurdle drills with the group and now just chilling out this afternoon before an easy 8 miles this evening.
Things have been going really well these last few weeks in training and John has been working me pretty hard in my sessions. I’ve been doing loads of strength work, the thing that has really let me down in the past. 3 out of my last 4 main track sessions have had at least one 2k rep in them so I’ve been going round in circles so many times! The thing is, I’ve got to get used to it, I want to improve over 5000m and this is what I believe I needed, running multiple laps of the track especially when tired.
Saturday was the best example. It was a session i’ve done before- 2k, 1k x3 however instead of running the 1k reps at 5k pace we were told to run them at 3k pace. The wind wasn’t on our side either so we had our work cut out! There was myself, Jonny Thewlis and Chris Thompson doing the session. Thommo was testing out his achilles so he was doing the 1k reps a lot slower than us. This meant when Jonny and I were absolutely hanging he was there plodding the 2k’s and we were dying! It was good though as it gave us someone to hang on to after we’d flogged ourselves trying to hit the 1k’s pretty hard.
It was a good session on the whole though and it was a good feeling to ‘flood my system’ with lactic then try to run controlled at 10k pace.
This week things will be fairly similar, strength orientated, however tomorrow we will do some 1k reps before moving through the gears and running some 400′s with the group and also some 200′s. This should blow the cobwebs out for me and i’ll look forward to that.
I’m not sure what i’ll have on Saturday yet but it should hopefully be something a little faster before my 3k next Tuesday. I’ll be staying over in Liverpool at Jonny Mellors (I wont be taking my car though as i’ll probably come back and it’ll be on bricks!) From there I’m off to Font Romeu for 2 weeks to do some training before a 5k in Belgium.
I decided to go back to Font Romeu just to top up on the altitude and get some specific training done before my 2nd 5k of the year. I know UKA are basing themselves there with some of the World Champs squad so it was an ideal opportunity for me to book some flights and meet up with some of the guys there for some runs. That was my logic behind pacing at Watford last week, it paid fairly well for an 9 laps of work and it’s covered the majority of my trip! All good!