Training Log Archive: Badger

Hyde Park

Event: London Street-O Race #7: Hampstead
 

Hampstead Street-O. This was as bad a Street-O run for me as last month's was good. I picked a poor route right from the start from which it was never possible to recover, going S/SE first, whereas I clearly should have gone straight to the points-heavy NW area around Hampstead village, which meant I ended up looping back near the start half-way through, a very inefficient route. I also made the mistake of missing out a few controls early on, and then leaving myself with nothing much to pick up in the last 10 minutes. I also managed to make a couple of navigational errors (one involving running down a steep hill for about 300m before slogging back up again!). So a very poor run navigationally.

On the plus side the running didn't feel too bad, although I struggled a bit with the hills - not used to contours at the moment with all my flat marathon training.

So fully deserved my worst street-O result for quite a while in 5th place, although I look to have wrapped up at least a top 3 finish in the series for the first time ever I think.

Results - 5th out of 72

Lambeth Bridge loop

Home to Thames Path / Bushy Park and back. Probably the most important training session of the whole 18-week programme, the longest Marathon Pace run - 4-mile warm up then 14 miles at MP. Very pleased with how well it went - marathon pace felt pretty comfortable throughout, certainly felt like much less of a hard tempo effort than it used to and just felt like a normal sustainable pace once I got into it. Getting towards the stage where I feel I could hold this pace for at least most of the required time, given another month's training and a proper taper going into the race. The pacing went well, held a steady 4:11-4:12/km on the watch for most of it, and went through 21.1km in 88:45, pretty much bang on my race-day first half target of 89 mins. Good stuff.

Work to Hyde Park and back.

Battersea Park. Intervals (6 x 1km, off 2:30 recovery) - splits 3:37, 3:35, 3:37, 3:33, 3:35, 3:33 (average 3:35)

I thought this would be a tough session, so was pleased to get through it with an average overall pace on my 3:35/km target. There was a bit of a wind today (blowing west to east) which made the 1st/3rd/5th intervals quite a bit tougher – I was quite worried after the first one whether I could keep the pace up – but the return legs felt much easier. Certainly felt like I was working hard to get through this on the target pace, but I guess that's how an intervals session should be.