Training Log Archive: TimM

So that's another three months in Chamonix over rather quickly. Of course leaving those trails behind is a little tough but my overwhelming feeling at the moment is that I very much need a rest, which I'm not sure I'll get much of before uni kicks off but hey ho.

Been thinking quite a lot about how it has all gone so going to put a few og those thoughts up on here, maybe someone will find it slightly interesting.

I think I could split the summer into two halves; the first being defined by the two races I did, meaning long runs weren't really that long and I wasn't really as keen to pile on the hours as much. Think this served as a good transition period back into the mountains anyway - I'd been a little shocked by how big the mountains felt and how long the climbs seemed to take to begin with in comparison with last year. Going into the Argentrail I wasn't too sure how my shape was but was more than satisfied with how I felt that day, particularly in comparison with last year.

The second half, and in particular the last month or so, was all about preparing for the Ben Nevis Ultra. Seemed to string a few good weeks together with plenty of long days on the legs but also a solid amount of higher intensity work, mainly longish efforts at threshold kind of pace. Probably wouldn't have heart to put some flatter stuff in but hard to do when you can literally climb for as long as you like without having to go back down. On the longer days I tried to alternate between routes that involved more slow movement / scrambling and ones which were more about running continuously for a number of hours. I think I managed to build up far better conditioning towards multiple climbs and descents compared to last year. I think it's pretty easy to be able to bash out a climb and then a long descent without hurting the legs, but far harder to then go into a second or third round of that without starting to suffer so kept that in mind with the aim of hitting the last climb of Ben Nevis Ultra ready to push on a bit. Also think I've become a far better walker which may not sound that great but was important to improve on.

That second half was also quite a test of recovery - work was always quite draining (early starts, long periods on feet and many, many flights of stairs) and sleep was never quite long or good enough. So basically spent pretty much all my spare time either napping or eating and seemed to just about be ok.

So hopefully I'll have returned a fair bit stronger and I can build on that over the next winter which will no doubt return to a more familiar training pattern, and in many ways feels like a completely different life. One of the main things that seemed to help over the summer was to take the easy stuff really super easy - something always talked about but hard to actually enforce when running with other people. That in-between intensity of not hard, but also not as easy as it should be is something to try and avoid.

Rather exited for next Friday's race now, and then a packed schedule of racing lined up.

C • Slightly interesting 2

Buskett's and Matley. As usual after a rest day, legs felt rather sluggish to begin with.

Combination of work / travel / grim hangover meant no running today. Same combination, plus the last week of running have also left me feeling a little ill so probably for the best anyway.

Post end of season cheese feast at the cremerie. Just along the Petit Balcon Sud.