Royton Road Runner back in the gang

It has been tough to train which a mixture of work, life and plain old too tired excuses. Since my last post I have done Exeter Riverside parkrun, Bushy parkrun, Ian Casey Memorial 5k and on Sunday 25th May the Blackpool Promenade 10 miler!

For the Exeter parkrun it was an opportunity as I was there for the weekend to watch Oldham Athletic take on Exeter for the final away game. So not good prep on the booze train the Friday before and finishing at the pub circa 11:30pm.

Still on the Saturday morning I bimbled down to start and lined up with a big crowd, it was super windy and so got into the middle of the huddle to keep warm! The course is nice and uses part of the University grounds so no dogs allowed, dogs are welcome but can prove tricky along with pushchairs (especially when they overtake you, gets me down like being in a marathon and someone in a costumes goes past!)

It's an out and back, the return leg reminded me of cross country at school and the side winds that used to hit you on Oldham Edge.

It was a tight crowd so until you do the big lap of the field there is little opportunity to make progress.

All in all a good run with the training and beer the day before meant doing a parkrun for fun not a time.


The weekend after was the Army versus Navy at Twickenham so same routine, beer on the train down on the Friday but did not have a late night, it was a two mile walk to Bushy Park so plenty of warm up...

The park is impressive and deer roam around the park which actually delayed the event as they crossed in front of the start.

I made it onto the run report as a visitor and I tried to smile honest, I ran the run wearing the brand new RRR bobble hat, the season for hats kind of over and it was a sweaty mess at the end so it was the first thing in the wash when I got back late Sunday!

It was a busy crowd of 1525 finishers so again locked into a pace but gave me good splits of

8:21

8:21

8:05

for the last hundred meters.... 6:47 strong finish

So ticked off the bucket list, if you are a parkrunner then do Bushy - the original and home of parkrun at least once.

Once I got back to the hotel I met a couple in the foyer and they enquired where I had run, they advised doing Kingston parkrun as it only has 300 runners and is a good course. So will do that next year.

Back to racing I took part in my first RRR race of the year The Ian Casey 5k Memorial, Ian Casey was a club member who tragically had a heart attack and died during the Gloucester Marathon in 2009. I did not get chance to know him well but he was much respected by everyone and we still turn up on mass for the 5K setup in his memory.

So this time I had prepped a little and being straight after work had to rush there. Garry Bower gave me a lift which is half the battle getting to races without a car.

I had forgot my watch so had to run with my phone in my hand, this did give me an opportunity to take a selfie of course

Ian's son also raced which for the 10 year anniversary was added poignancy, typically it was cold and small showers just to keep you on your toes. The buzz of a race is as exciting as ever and off we went up the hill, two laps of the Cowm reservoir and then back down the hill for a sprint finish.

The race went well and even splits with a strong finish, hopefully I can get back to 22 minute 5K times soon.
Cheeky pint after the race in memory of Ian

So now onto the biggest challenge so far this year, the Blackpool 10 miler

Once upon a time I would race 10 miles with ease... this time round, no real training, my longest run as been 6.7 miles and that was a bimble. I tried last Sunday to do 8 miles but that failed, lack of hydration, my hay fever tablet and roadworks with queuing traffic meant I packed up and walked home with just 3.5 miles logged.

On the Thursday before the race I joined in with the base group and we clocked 5 miles, all groups took it a bit easy with the race at the weekend and I heard people saying they would drop down a group to make sure they eased off.
It was the usual route to Tandle Hill Country Park and down to canal and back up to the club, still hard work and I got a taxi home rather than walk back up the hill to home...

Race day started at 8:30 for the coach pickup and as always a good bit of banter, but I was nervous and stared out of the window for most of the trip.
We arrived in plenty of time and the coach was parked close to the start so getting registered changed and warmed up was a breeze.

The course is basically two short laps from Glynn Square southwards to the War Memorial and back, then a long loop out to the north past the Norbreck castle hotel and back.

So a pensive start as I have not really done any distance training and this photo sums that up

On hand was support from runners who were injured and were very encouraging as you went past with their green and yellow pom poms! I can honestly say it was very helpful

The two short laps went okay and got into a rhythm trying to keep my heart rate down as was treating this as a training run, that notion went away as the racing bug always bubbles to the surface and decided 8:35 pace would be doable and that worked for the first 6 miles, the 7,8,9 miles were tough grinding out and once the dribs and drabs of people started passing me it got tougher.

The route was a bit boring and the small field of runners meant for large loop I was often on my own. The annoying "flat feet" runners that overtook me was demoralising its a pet hate they do that and sure they could fix it.

However at mile 9 I was caught up by Lisa from the club, as the pom pom team shouted my name, 5 seconds later I heard her name being shouted so settled for another place lost.
We had a quick chat and ran together for a bit and at 9.5 miles I decided to kick in and take a place back.

I finished with a chip time of 1:28:08 and the usual sprint finish, never I have wanted the water and chocolate freddo so much in my life, so much so I forget to stop the watch!




So not a bad effort and feel much happier now that I have done a tough race and look forward to the Oldham 10K, not the race I designed but apparently a tough hilly affair.
Mine was labelled "the flattest 10K in Oldham", Tony Muir labels his "the toughest 10K in Oldham" tongue in cheek perhaps but tough it is so 10K training starts now.

Strava Summit has a nice feature that tracks your fitness, it needs your FTP to be truly accurate but seems to be good enough without. It points out how your heart rate compares to your pace and flags up races when you tend to sustain anaerobic exercise.

Laters

Mark K

Back into running... again

On Sunday 7th April it was great to see Steve from work finish the Greater Manchester Marathon in a super time of 4:15 and some change.This was better than predicted by 5 minutes and it was a mixed emotion as I should have been racing in the marathon, a list of injuries and disappointments meant I deferred to 2020.

So the following Monday I vowed to get running again and did the usual 5k route and did 29:40 the wind was very strong, not helpful at all.

Thursday I did the same route and managed a little better 27:42 on both occasions my HR being near max so I know I am working hard but man it will take a lot more to get back to running comfortably.

So Sunday I decided to do my first LSR of the year, a whopping 10k on the classic Crompton loop. It was hard work and at 3 miles I passed my old house which usually would have meant run over, but knowing I had another 3 to go... tough medicine.
At 4 miles I fancied bailing out and heading for home, but the little running voice in my head said "go hard or go home", so up Shaw Road I went and huffed and puffed myself all the way home.

My trainers have now done 347 miles so time to start thinking about new running shoes and sideline these for short training runs as I step up the miles.

Also nice suffer score of 212 so reassuring the crap I went through translates into geek numbers!

So this week I will try the same routes and see if I can better them.

Keep Running

Mark

Started the week with a swim!

As planned I went to the pool on Monday morning, I hoped I had everything you need, Towel, Speedos... but as I got to the pool edge... goggles! Bah never mind, also my first swim in years and a first for using the Apple Watch.

The watch did very well and accurately counted the laps and was a breeze, the days of trying to remember what lap you are on and what time did you start swimming again... Not anymore.

I am using rungo with its "swagbag" to export to Strava, I am not happy that Strava does not support the Apple Watch natively and that when you do have rich data from Apple Health, rungo imports it fine, but once its gets there Strava holds minimal data.



So as I had trained in the pool in the morning I fancied a blast on the turbo so did 15k again but this time found a good gear and enjoyed the ride.



Unfortunately I planned to go for a 5k run but could not fit it in so finished the week with a 15 minute 145 bpm turbo session, finally got the cadence sensor just right thanks to a video on youtube.


So getting back into some sort of fitness regime, this week I will try to use the turbo trainer up to Wednesday night as from Thursday I am on a holiday to Nuremberg, Germany so have packed my running stuff for parkrun on Saturday!

Back on the turbo trainer

Since I am struggling to run and the weather not exactly nice for running, I decided to dust off the old Tacx Flow turbo trainer.

Quite a struggle as it is that old it only uses USB and the software I had only ran on Windows 7, also the licence is tied to the laptop it was installed on.
As luck would have it I found the laptop, the screen does not work and was well behind on patches and anti-virus so took ages to get running, plus the Tacx software incrementally updates so had to go from 3.7 to 3.12.

The first few sessions worked well and decided to invest in a Heart Rate Monitor, again the unit being so old it does not use Bluetooth or ant+ so after research managed to find the "Sigma Analogue" HRM on Amazon.

So today managed to get 15km done and it works as if was 5 years ago! The process to get the workout into Strava a little convoluted as I have to export to a Polar HRM format, then use a converter to change it to a Garmin TCX file and then finally upload to Strava!

If I keep up the effort, I will buy a newer turbo trainer that connects via bluetooth to an iPad. Then I can us Zwift which a great training app and puts you on virtual courses, races etc.

So for this week I will attempt some swimming on Monday and a run on Thursday to complement the turbo sessions.

Back racing with RRR

Sunday 4th November was the Derwentwater 10, the last race on the Royton Road Runners calendar.
So what better way to put my return to the club than putting the RRR running vest back on, doing the last race and one of the hardest!

The coach picked us up at 8am and off we went! I had nerves not just about the race but about meeting club mates again and although nice to be remembered, reminders of how quick I used to be was all around. People I used to race again I knew I had no chance of beating and kept reminding myself that today was just a sighter and a target for next year to beat, something Brian Moore happily reminded me of.
It had been raining all night so it was going to be wet on the roads, that stuff just rolls off the hills and pours onto the roads, torrents as it turned out but that is part of the fun of the race.

As per usual I headed off quick, that will never change and soon got into my rhythm and the pace I wanted to do.

Water at about 4.5 miles was heaven and then the hills just kept on coming, funny marshal near the end claiming that was the last hill... I hope he gets a nasty rash for a week.


I preferred the old course, fewer hills near the end!

2010 66 minutes

2018 85 minutes

But I was the first V40 back for Royton Road Runners so not a bad start back at the club.

Keep running everyone

Mark

giving trainasone.com a whirl

For the last few weeks I have been increasing the mileage, trying to keep to the 10% rule i.e. do not up your effort too quickly as this can lead to injury so week "A" you do 10 miles then next week "B" you do 11 miles.

So far it has worked and the mileage is getting there with a mixture of longer runs and now one extra day, so trying to do 4 runs a week.

Strava however has a new feature for "Summit' users (formerly known as premium) on the iPhone, it looks to track your effort for the week and compare to the previous week. so as you progress through the week it warns if you are pushing it too hard or the opposite.
It does this based on the suffer score (Strava's measure of your heart rate vs pace etc during runs.

Try and keep in the white zone

As you progress the week, it advises you

This is good but I still cannot seem to reconcile how to balance the effort, I want to increase mileage but this pushes me over, running slow is no good to me as it historically led to injury (change in running gait) so as you can see I have yet to keep in the "Zone"

By chance on one of my runs I came across a club mate who I have not seen in ages, as we ran around Shaw together I talked about how I getting back and trying to plan my runs he told me of some software he uses. The conversation was somewhat difficult as my fitness is still way off, but the basis of what he said was you set a goal, the website tells him what to do, it reviews how it went and using AI sets your next few runs.

So a few days later I contacted him via facebook and got the name of the website, trainasone.com it has a free account or premium coming at £6 a month and you can use a 21 day trial. It was easy to link to Strava and pulled in the last few months of data so it has a good knowledge of what you have been up to.

For the first few weeks it sets a good number of different "Assessment" runs, these are made up of different stages to a run i.e. walk, easy, all out for set durations.

As you complete runs it adjusts the future assessments and what it refers to "Economy" runs i.e. a normal go out for 6 miles at 8:40 pace.

This can make it difficult to remember to do as you run so writing it on my hand the only way to do this.

On the morning of the run a reminder of the objective is emailed to you

The on the go version!

So far so good and it only shows you a few weeks and the website explains in the beginning it might look as you are doing less but it is key to establish a baseline for all paces like tempo and threshold.

The last run of the week was a struggle as was still very hungover from Saturdays Latics trip to Morecambe. It had plenty of slow pace sections with a 2 mile "fast as you can" effort in the middle, given this took in 2 hills I did my best!

It may be a co-incidence but trainasone.com seems to have delivered my first week "in the zone"

Thanks for reading

Mark

Starting to get back running

So far this year it has been a patchy restart to my running life but things are looking positive now.
Getting to training nights with Royton are proving difficult and not usually able to get to a parkrun on a Saturday so have chosen to match the distance I would have done, so a training night would be 10K and parkrun obviously 5K.

The process to get my coaching licence re-activated is moving on and this week received my DBS (Disclosure and Barring Service) certificate, so England Athletics can send me my new licence.

How to get to club nights will still be a challenge, Mondays and Thursdays are from the Cricket club so it is just a case of a jog (if I am not working away), Wednesdays are at Kingsway track which is a car journey and I still have no car with no plans in the short term to get one.

So just focusing on getting fit, losing weight and reading the latest info set out by England Athletics.

On Monday I wanted to do a 10k mostly because I had signed up to the Strava July 10K challenge and time was running out, I find this a good motivator as I am not racing or training it is too easy to plump for short runs.
I started by planning the route and remembered I now live on the route of the Milltown 10K I created for the series with Alan Keane back in 2011.

My goto routing tool is www.mapmyrun.com and set about re-creating the run, of course with a different start/finish!

Here is my effort and aim to do it at the end of each month so I can compare efforts



I really want to complete the August distance and hill climbing challenges so watch this space!

Lastly for this week the local craft beer place I frequent (The Secret SIP) has engaged with the Mikkeller brewery who have set up running clubs all over the world, it is a simple fun concept. 1 Saturday a month turn up to the pub run a 5k or 10k get back and get a free pint of beer when you get back.

It was great to speak with Ben who is setting it up, his enthusiasm for the project was great and it is something I will support (if it does not clash with football)
So registered the app and soon the Oldham "Chapter" will be live, could not link the app to Strava and Ben had the same issue but he managed to do it via the website.
Not something I have managed to do yet but no rush to resolve.

Check it out at Mikkeller

Have a good week

Mark