13

~ e.v. ~ 1 Comment

I went for the 8 mile race instead of the 3 after all. I think it’s officially 8.2 miles. My watch got it as 13km. The conditions were warm and sunny, similar to the last few races. You don’t expect to have so much sun in England, but maybe that’s climate change for you.

I struggled with the sun in the last two races so I was a bit apprehensive. The route was on country roads which were heavily shaded in places and totally open in others. We started at 10:30 so some of the shade gradually reduced as the sun moved overhead. I was quite aggressive in trying to minimise my sun exposure on the course, even if it was just running right next to a hedge that gave my legs a bit of cover. I also carried my own bottle of water because these tiny charity runs tend to provide water in cups which are very difficult to drink from while moving.

And it went like this…

Oh what’s that? Is that even pacing? Yes, it went exactly to plan. I decided to go out at a 4:30/km pace (22:30 5k, 45:00 10k – nice round numbers), and I actually stuck to the plan and kept it solid the whole way.

I had the fun experience of gradually overtaking all the people who hadn’t paced it as well, which I was on the other side of last time!

The end result was that I felt great when I finished, with no hint of dehydration. It was a huge win for sensible pacing and a confidence boost in general after a string of races where I’ve struggled. I think the water helped too.

It’s not all good though. My right knee is feeling a bit niggly. Since this run, I now have a Garmin Running Dynamics Pod which gives me some more stats on my running form. I’ve used it twice so far and on both runs I spent a lot more time on my right leg than my left leg and the difference gets bigger on hills and trail paths (and hilly trails, well that’s even worse). That’s interesting to know and is probably my problem. Unfortunately it can’t tell me why, or how to balance it. You could take the view that the left leg is weaker and my body is compensating. You could also take the view that the left leg is working optimally and the right leg is slow (after all, a short ground contact time is good).

I need to figure this out on my own, but I think it’ll involve a lot of single leg plyometrics.

I have a 10k this weekend, which is the last race in the near future (thankfully!). I’ll be interested to see what my L/R balance is like on a sustained race effort.

Work

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

Work is annoying me a bit. I’m off this week, so Friday was my last day. My manager was off on Friday. I should have been tidying something up and getting it finished before being on holiday, but what actually happened was one of the sales staff decided to take advantage of my manager not being in to start harassing me directly. She phoned my personal mobile, which I ignored because I didn’t recognise the number. Then she phoned the landline and my sister picked it up! The reason for the call was to ask me to jump into a video meeting with her. FFS, just send an email. 🤦

So we had a video call for her to demonstrate something which my manager has already told her several times is correct behaviour and she doesn’t understand her test data. “But the test data is fine” she insisted. Anyway, apparently this was super urgent because it affects her ability to show it to clients, so I spent several hours going through it to find exactly where her test data wasn’t what she thought it was. Several emails later she still doesn’t really understand and helpfully suggests “I’m happy to do another call if it helps clarify”. No!

Needless to say I didn’t get any actual work done, and I was trying to fix a bug that will actually affect her ability to do show it to clients, so that will have to wait a week now. 🤷 Aaarrrgggghhhh. She is a nice person but oh my god.

10k!

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The 10k went much better than the half marathon two weeks ago. The weather was similar, with bright sunshine and about 18 degrees C. According to Garmin the course had about 60m of elevation. This raised my eyebrow because 60m over 10k is about the same as 30m over my local 5k Parkrun, which I regard as not flat but certainly not very hilly either, whereas the 10k felt pretty hilly. This led me down a rabbit hole of reading about how elevation data is calculated. The simple answer is that it’s calculated according to elevation mapping datasets, but these are noisy and imperfect. Then, small differences are smoothed out by a curve smoothing algorithm to try to account for the noise. If you change the smoothing parameters, my run gives a total elevation climb of anywhere between 32m and 180m. So in summary: garbage in, garbage out. Let’s just say that it was a two lap course with two climbs on each lap.

My time was 43:05 which got me 26th place out of just over 300. It’s towards the slower end of a 10k for me but it was hilly and hot. Two people passed me around the 7th-8th km and that was entirely on me for going out too fast and not being able to hold the pace (I only held as well as I did because I was trying to keep up with one of them). This is frustrating because my pacing over about 5k is usually either perfectly even or slightly negative (faster on the second half) but apparently pacing longer distances is still a mystery to me. Though the heat doesn’t help.

And as for the heat…. well, I didn’t die or feel unwell, but I definitely felt the sun. I think the forecast temperature is largely irrelevant compared to whether or not it’s clear sun, which is really what cooks both you and the road. I prepared better this time by wearing a very light running vest and drinking half a bottle of water 15-20 minutes before. But I think I actually got more dehydrated on this 10k than I did on the half marathon two weeks before. My ears blocked up right after I finished, which is something I’ve only experienced one other time from running, but it was also during a hot race and I think it’s a dehydration thing. There was water on the course but it was in little paper cups rather than bottles, so you couldn’t take it with you while running. I grabbed one cup, managed to get about half a mouthful into my mouth and then poured the rest over my head. I’d have fared a lot better with bottles because I’d have got more water into me and I could have kept pouring it over me for longer. Today I feel a bit headachy and probably worse than I did after the half.

My achilles tendon was fine until about 7km (on a hill) then gave me a 1/10 ache for the rest of the run. I’m trying to remember how this has developed. It’s a small ache in the mid-portion (i.e. slightly above the heel), which is supposedly easier to rehab than the insertional variant (i.e. right down at the bottom of the heel). I’ve been having tightness in my calves on and off for a few weeks so it all blurs together, but I think I didn’t feel anything in the actual tendon until last Monday. And I think that I’ve probably overstretched it in trying to sort out my calves. At the moment I can’t really stretch them at all without it starting to ache. So I think with a few easy days and no stretching (and definitely no hills this week), it should start recovering. I don’t feel like running today anyway…

Next on the calendar is another 10k in three weeks. But in two weeks there is a 3 mile/8 mile race very locally which I did last year. If it wasn’t for the achilles tendon I’d be signed up to the 8. I’ll see how it is by the end of the week, the 3 miles should be OK…

Birmingham

~ e.v. ~ 1 Comment

Or, did I finally lift the half marathon curse? Spoiler alert: no I didn’t.

In the end, what actually got me was the weather. Again. The forecast was about 12 degrees, cloudy and maybe a bit of drizzle. Most of my training this year has been done in cold, wet and windy weather, so, apart from being a few degrees warmer, these conditions would have been fine. Unfortunately, though, the cloud had to meet other engagements so we actually had pure sunshine at the time of the year when the sun is is starting to project some real power. Apparently it was the warmest day of the year so far, and I got sunburnt. (And less than a week later, I was walking up to Parkrun thinking “hmm, I wish I’d put my gloves on”)

I ran pretty well for about 10km then started to feel a bit dubious. By about 12km I started feeling very nauseous and thought I was going to throw up (I didn’t), and had to stop and walk a couple of times. The 25m climb over the 12th kilometre possibly didn’t help. As of the 16km water station I kept hold of the bottle and kept pouring it over my head to cool me down. It helped a lot and towards the end I was keeping a steady pace again, but my heart rate was very high.

The course was very up and down for the first half, then, after a real climb up to about 12km, settled into a steady downhill. So in theory the second half and especially the last third should have been much faster, but everyone I follow on Strava (with one exception) had splits similar to mine, with a total drop off from around 12km that never recovered. I’m not sure if that was the fatigue from the hills in the first half or the the cumulative effects of the heat (I suspect the latter). The one exception ran fairly even splits, and then collapsed at the end and ended up in the medical tent afterwards (he’s fine now).

I had underestimated the hills. In previous years the course was much flatter, but they changed it this year and hadn’t published a profile. The first 7km went in circles up and down some fairly steep hills in the city centre. Runalyze has the total elevation gain at 211m, which makes it the hilliest half I’ve done. It has almost the same amount of total elevation gain as the Boston marathon (over half the distance), which is considered a difficult marathon because of the hills. I’m not really a big fan of hills.

Anyway, the summary is that I wasn’t pleased with the result at the time (1:47), but it was a tough course on a hot day and I still managed to hold a decent pace over the last few kilometres, so that’s a win. Usually when I struggle, I look at the race photos afterwards and my posture has collapsed, but this time I still look pretty strong by the end, so that’s a positive too.

I have to mention the goody bag. Post run goody bags are usually underwhelming, but Great Run outdid themselves here. It included some hummus “crisps”, a the token unappetising protein bar and… a bottle of vitamin C tablets. Not a multivitamin, but vitamin C specifically. Because… runners are prone to scurvy? 🤷‍♂️ I do like the Great Run t-shirts though. They always seem very high quality. This year’s is quite thin, so I now have a wide selection of light summer and thicker winter running t-shirts from Great Run.

Recovery was fine and I was running again a couple of days later. I actually did too much in the week afterwards and this week I’ve been quite achy and have had to tone it back a bit. My right hip and left achilles are a little bit grumpy. I’ll probably skip Parkrun tomorrow and save my legs for a 10k I’m doing on Sunday, which hopefully will go better than the half. The forecast is sunny and hot, but I’m prepared with a new very light summer running top. I’d like to say the course will be easier, but it’s two laps with a 600m long 2.8% gradient hill on each lap… hmm. At least it’s only 10k.

Tapering

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Half Marathon on Sunday.

I’m pleased with my training. I had COVID in January and it took me until mid March to feel like it wasn’t affecting my running anymore, but since then I’ve kept the mileage and intensity up and felt pretty strong. I held it around 70km per week for six weeks, with two long runs per week between 16km and 23km, one tempo (30-60mins) and one 5k threshold (Parkrun) which has been steadily increasing in pace. I started tapering a bit early because my calves felt too tight for the one last short tempo last Wednesday, but I’ve done a couple of 5km progression runs since then. I bought some calf compression sleeves and have been wearing them for the last few runs, though I don’t know if they make a difference. All that remains now is a shakeout Parkrun tomorrow and then I’m done.

That’s the good side. The bad side is that my calves still ache a bit, I woke up last night because my knee was aching (seriously? I do all that training and then when I knock my mileage way down, that’s when you decide to ache?) and I had to get up and stretch my hamstrings out to get it to stop, I feel a bit rough possibly because my hayfever is starting, and the weather is becoming muggy which I will definitely feel on Sunday. Oh, and all my easy runs feel hard and suddenly I have no confidence in my training.

I hate tapering. You get into a rhythm with training and then suddenly it’s all gone. You have much more free time and you don’t know what to do with it and I start waking up really early because it turns out I don’t need 10 hours of sleep a night when I’m not running much.

I’ve decided that I’m going to take it a little bit conservatively. I’ll be looking for sub 1:40 and then to build on that for the next one. I feel like I need the experience and confidence boost of a half marathon going to plan for a change. Something we need to bear in mind is that the half marathons involving me are cursed. I haven’t run a good half marathon since before COVID. I counted them all up and there are 7 of them; some of them were cancelled, some of them I just did terribly. Most other people would have taken the hint, but not me. So here we are. 8th time lucky?

Also, I’m toying with the idea of a full marathon early next year. So I need this to go well, or at least, better than the last 7.

Locals!

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

I’m not exactly excited about local elections, because they are incredibly boring, but I am quite interested to see the overall results.

In national polls, Labour has a really big lead. But Labour’s lead is almost entirely due to the collapse of the Conservatives and the zero sun nature of two party politics. I think the Tories fully deserve their terrible polling figures, and I think that Labour does not at all deserve their strong figures.

So what does that actually look like in an election? Locals are obviously a bit removed from national polling, but my suspicion is Labour will underperform and the real winner will be the Lib Dems who will pick up a lot of “neither of those, please” votes. But I have been known to be completely wrong.

We’ll find out on Friday!

Stress

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I think we got the jury service sorted out. My employer asked me to defer it until December, which is a lull in their need of me, according to their scheduling (note: you can’t schedule software development a week in advance, let alone 8 months, but whatever). This still needs to be approved by the courts, but I think it’s likely they will.

In other stressful news… About 3 and a half years ago I left my previous job because it was a toxic workplace. I should have left at least a year earlier and being there every day did a lot of damage to both my mental and physical well-being. I think it caused something like complex PTSD but that’s another blog post I don’t really intend to write…

The problem was really just one particular woman. But that’s ancient history now… Or is it?

I was on a run today and guess who I saw. She didn’t see me, or possibly she saw me first and pretended to be fascinated by her phone.

Here’s my heart rate graph, see if you can guess where I saw her.

It’s the big spike just before 35 minutes.

I actually felt pretty alarmed just to see her. All the feelings of anxiety came back in an instant and I felt the rest of the run feeling sick. I guess I’m a bit surprised. Before lockdown when I used to get the train to my new job I always used to feel the stress when we passed my old job’s building, but I really thought that I wouldn’t be so easily triggered now.

Anyway, the good news is that it’ll probably never happen again. This was along the high street in the town centre and she lives in a different town, so it was probably an unusual visit for her.

Judgement

~ e.v. ~ 2 Comments

The first piece of exciting news is that I have been selected for Jury Service! Ahhhh. I told my manager and he was like “yeah, fine”, but then he told the company owner, who is now having a bit of a tantrum about it. I don’t think he’s come across the situation before as he doesn’t seem to understand the options and currently thinks I don’t need to do it if it inconveniences him (nope).

I can ask to defer it until another time in the next 12 months if my employer won’t give me the time off, which is probably what he’ll want me to do. I don’t really see why my employer gets a say at all, to be honest, and I would prefer to just get it out of the way. I need to respond to the summons within the next few days (or potentially be in contempt of court!) with either an “ok” or “I can’t do it on this date because [reasons], but I can do it on these dates instead” and at the moment I’m twiddling my thumbs waiting for my employer.

There was a post on Reddit earlier that said something like “in relationships, look for people who make your life easier, not harder”. Very apt.

Anyway…

It’s three and a bit weeks to go until my next half marathon. My last few weeks of running looks like this:

I’m mostly focusing on durations rather than distances. I haven’t really decided on a target time or pace, but it should be between 1:30 and 1:40, hence why you see a lot of 16km runs (which take me about 1:30 at an easy pace).

My body is hungry, tired and achy, and I am so fed up of the weather! The 18km on Wednesday included a 60 minute tempo, which included long stretches of running into strong wind gusts. Try holding a tempo pace in a 30mph headwind, it’s not easy!

Updates

~ e.v. ~ 1 Comment

One of my mum’s friends has just lost her job because the company has ceased to exist, because the owner is in hospital and unlikely to recover. It’s a risk of small companies with an aging owner. I work for a small company with an owner in his mid 70s. Hmm. I’m also bored with work and I don’t feel I’m growing, but on the other hand… I can’t really be bothered? I keep thinking about it, though. I keep getting recruitment messages. I’ve been here for coming up to three and a half years now. I am getting frustrated by the work though. Everything is always urgent, more urgent than the thing I’m currently working on, which was urgent yesterday but now is not. And it’s the classic software problem of trying to convert what could generously be described as a half baked idea into something subjected to logical consistency. The compiler doesn’t stand for nonsense!

Running updates: A few weeks ago I was aiming for a 22:30 Parkrun and ended up with 23:15 or something. The following week I had the same aim and ran 22:15 – yep, a whole minute faster, and it felt like only a moderate effort. I was super pleased with that. I was planning to just do a full effort run this last week and see where I am, but that was scuppered by the snow and ice. Parkrun went ahead but on a very revised course, which was about 50% grass. Or, more accurately, mud. In road shoes. In theory you could use the lack of friction to your advantage, but I haven’t quite mastered that. So we’ll see next week. I’m not too optimistic though – I did some hill repeats yesterday and felt like I was going to die.

I’m now approximately two months post-virus and this last week my resting heart rate finally came back down to pre-virus levels, but it’s still often elevated when running.

With Stratford cancelled, my next race is Birmingham half marathon in just under 8 weeks. Birmingham is usually a fairly flat course outside of maybe two or three nasty hills. I’ve been doing 75 minute runs for the last few weeks and this week bumped one up to 90 minutes. Ideally I want to be doing one 75 minute run and one 90-120 minute run per week (at tortoise pace). In theory I’ll be fully virus recovered by then, but as I still have lingering effects now I’m not sure how effective the training has been and will be… I have modest expectations.

Monty in the snow:

Setbacks

~ e.v. ~ 4 Comments

The Stratford half marathon has been cancelled due to low entry numbers. I’m a little bit irritated by this because I think it’s the organisers’ own fault. I hadn’t signed up yet, because I was signed up in 2020 when they cancelled it and didn’t offer refunds. Entry was instead deferred to 2021… which was also cancelled with no refunds. So I was waiting until nearer the date to sign up this time. Entry numbers are low with 8 weeks to go… Hmm well there’s a mystery 🙄

If things were different I’d be very disappointed, but I’m not really sure I’d have been up to it anyway. My post COVID or whatever fitness is nowhere near being able to run a half in a decent time and I think if I tried I’d have a very bad time. I’m quite glad I was injured for Warwick because I think I would have blown up very quickly if I’d tried to race it.

I aimed for a 22:30 Parkrun this week. It’s a nice round number of 4:30 per km. Pre-virus, I was regularly doing 10k tempo runs at that pace which felt like moderate effort, so it seemed very achievable to keep that pace over 5k running with other people. 23:11 is what I actually ran. Not even close! I tried to really push on the last km but my legs weren’t interested.

It’s weird. I can still do very short intervals at reasonably fast paces and I can still do 60 minute slow runs, but the middle ground of trying to maintain a moderate speed for any length of time just isn’t happening.

I’ve been reading articles on running after COVID and a few other people have made similar points. I think it’ll just take more time. In the meantime, the fact I can still do the long slow runs is encouraging. Hopefully that will actually translate to aerobic fitness at some point…