After failing to finish the Marathon du Pays Basque, I realised that I needed to change my training if I am to have any hope of doing it another year.
First thing to go was pretty much all the runs on the flat. I still haven't found an athletics track to use so I'm not eliminating track work, as such. I just never get to do any.
Replacing it is a core long run (around 21k) each week and a couple of other sessions. Over the summer, these have been hill sprints of hill repeats depending on how I feel on the day.
The hill sprints session consists of :
- 5 to 10 minute warm-up run
- Sprint 150m up a trail which is on about a 10% gradient
- Trot back down and jog around a flattish area until my heart rate sinks below 150 again
- Repeat 2 and 3 above until you think you could do one more repeat but aren't really sure about two. For me, this is usually 7-10 reps total.
- Cooldown with a 5-10 minute jog.
- Run up a hill at a decent pace.
- Run down the hill at the same pace.
- Repeat until done, using the last descent as a cooldown.
So yesterday, I finally did a tempo run. My first ever. I set out at a decent pace (for me, anyway) on a 5k loop. The first part covers the uphill of the hill repeats above and then the rest loops across and down some grass trails.
When I first jogged up the hill it took me over 11 minutes and I had to have a rest at the top. In recent sets of hill reps, that has gradually fallen to 9:45. Today, I went at it and got up there in 9:25, completing the rest of the loop in a little over 30 minutes.
I felt OK so thought I'd go for a second loop and was staggered to see I made the hill in 9:17. The rest of the loop was also on a negative split. I know that this wasn't as fast as the pace for my 1h59m half marathon (in Paris) but this was a training run, reasonably hilly and some on trails and dirt paths.
I am absolutely delighted.
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