:D Kinda how the last couple of months have felt! But actually, some pretty big changes have been happening, changes that needed some time to manufacture and shape.
Was supposed to run Hubert 100km in early May, but Uni wasn't really conducive to that being a realistic proposition, so instead I ended up with the extra adventures in the latter half of April instead.
I did however always plan to have most of May as an unstructured month, with easy runs etc before building back up again - and that still happened. However, I also decided that as I didn't have an event of any serious nature on the horizon, that I'd try a few things with my training that are different to how I've gone before.
Namely, I've decided to go for a heavily polarized training set-up. So, lots of really easy stuff and then enough really hard stuff. And try not to drift into that middle ground to often, as is so often the case.
It's actually been quite hard. Trying to run whilst only breathing through your nose (the 'easy' intensity end) makes for what feels like ridiculously slow progress. Ridiculously. And then you get the feedback from the likes of Garmin and Strava, that tell you that you are losing fitness (as your 3-4 week averages become more heavily weighted with these easy runs), which gets a bit frustrating, to say the least. However, with that said, I've just started to get back to the more structured stuff and starting to put the odd bit of intensity back into running, so those potentially negative feedback streams should slow/be stemmed.
And I have to say, this re-introduced harder running hasn't felt too bad. For all the 'lost fitness', I have still been able to hit similar paces as previously - all is not lost! :D Although the bursts are generally short, I can feel how my breathing doesn't ramp up as quickly, and drops sooner when it does. Basically, as expected, I stay in an 'aerobic zone' for longer and recover quicker when I do push the intensity upwards.
It's hard to tell just where I am at exactly though, truth be told, because of the lack of 'races' or what not. Nothing since 5 Peaks; nothing at all planned until the next 5 Peaks!! Well, other runs, but not events with times and timing that I can gauge against quite so easily.
I've also shuffled my scheduling of running around, too. Goodbye Sunday long run. Yep, truly. Instead, hello family day. For arguably too long now, I've had this internal battle of wanting to run long, and wanting to hang out with the kids, yet too often I've tried to do both on the same day (joys of working Saturdays - but a necessity with uni), and neither has really won. So why do it? Through this last month and a half, my regular run buddy, Jess, has been injured, changed jobs and had life things to do around his (soon to be +1) family, so I've been training alone almost exclusively. My schedule, with uni, work and single parent life, doesn't really fit the Mon-Fri, 9-5 mould, so why still try to apply it? Habit. "Always done it this way". Not very strong reasons... So, yeah, good bye Sunday long run as my cornerstone of training, hello Thursday mornings.
Anyway, long and short of all of this is... I should start doing some more interesting things in running again in the not too distant future. So there may actually be some stuff worth reading soon!