I’m currently lying on the sofa, feeling sorry for myself after a wonderful wedding yesterday, watching the IAAF World Athletics Championships on the TV, and cheering on all the British athletes including Holly Bradshaw and Dina Asher-Smith.

This week of training hasn’t gone quite to plan but as I mentioned on my IG on Saturday, I’m trying to be more flexible, relax a little more and use these as learning opportunities.

Project BQ: The Building Phase Week 2

What did I learn this week? 

• I need to tone down my drinking. It makes me feel incredibly anxious the following day, not to mention sick/headachey, and is not conducive for marathon training. Read this post about why I’m doing Sober October – feel free to join me!
• Friday long runs for the win. I ran 10+ miles on Friday morning before driving down to Devon for a wedding, meaning I didn’t have to worry about where or when over the weekend, plus it meant I had some more focused time hanging out with Tom. I used to do a lot of my long runs on Friday mornings before work when training for the Berlin marathon and it worked so well (although I did have to use a teatowel to dry myself one Friday which wasn’t ideal).
• Flexibility needs to be key, my goal this week is to sit down and make a rough training plan for the next month, going through our diaries to see what will work. I’ll then put in my actual runs when I get them on a week by week basis.

Monday

Strength workout from the Strong in Fall programme.

As many rounds as possible within 25 mins (feel free to change the timings if you want a shorter/longer workout)

• 10 narrow squat curl to press
• 8 weighted burpees
• 8 beast bench plyo to narrow jump squat
• 10 beast/tabletop kick throughs (I was so bad at these!)
• 40 bicycle crunches
• 8 Broad jumps to 3 small backward jumps

Tuesday

Rest Day

Wednesday

5.5 easy miles with Emma, 4 min run/1 min walk

Mistimed this one so didn’t quite manage 6 miles. But happy to be out for our first headtorch run of the season. It poured with rain all night, but our 6am run happened to be an hour where it magically stopped raining!

Thursday

Late night treadmill session to fit this workout in, 5 min warm up, 2 mins tempo pace, 1 min easy pace X 10, 5 min cool down.

Friday

1 hour 40 min long run along the Thames. Run 9 mins, walk 1 min for 10.25 total, 9.46 min mile average. I’ve used run/walk a lot while working with coach Ash on my easy runs and when I’m building mileage and I love it.

Saturday

Had grand plans to do parkrun with Tom but annoyingly the breakfast at our B&B was only available from 8.15-9am with no option to ‘grab and go’ or save it for later, and since we’d already paid for it, Tom was keen to take advantage of it. So I missed parkrun, and any run at all…

Sunday

Very hungover and a 3+ hour drive back from Devon meant this 45 min run didn’t get done (and prompted the Sober October decision)