This week has been tough. After slowly building my weekly mileage up, life decided I have not had enough challenges!
Work has been more demanding, home life has too, neither for negative reasons so I can’t complain but today started off with me running to the toilet at 5am to randomly throw up!
And that is where I start to think that this was not my best week for training!
I had already missed two training runs due to work and home life demands so this morning I was determined to run anyway, with the thinking that if I was going to be sick again, at least I could just do it at the side of the road and carry on running. Lovely.
As you may recall, I’m a bit of data junkie so I hate missing my plan, although the bigger picture data trend is great, you can see the impact even a slight hiccup has on the numbers for my TrainingPeaks fitness report, it’s such a ‘hard won’ number, I hate to see it slip!
Horses and ice
The only good thing this week related to running was an unplanned run yesterday, which was supposed to be a rest day. I ran without paying attention to pace or power, or much of anything really, just that I had to be back to see my little girl before she goes to school. So this run, I did a 5k, not fast by other people’s standards at a 10:25 per mile pace, but for me, that’s the fastest I have run in quite a while, what was interesting is that my perceived effort during this run was relaxed, demonstrating to me how much my trainings paying off.
My own wellbeing
Back to today’s run, a slow jaunt around the Cotswolds with a good friend for just 4 miles, thankfully I didn’t have to utilise the side of the road, but it was very slow that’s for sure and uneventful. Always nice to spend time with my friend Mark though. I find this social run to be cathartic, allowing me to exhale the pressures of the week with a likeminded friend, I no longer consider this run to be training for my body, but for my mental wellbeing. The run is now a lot slower than I need for my training plan but I really value it.
I have a 15 miles run planned for tomorrow, not sure yet if that will happen but we will see!
If tomorrow’s run happens, I expect it to be exceptionally slow, but I’m not going to worry about that.
Big Bloke Running 