I had certainly planned to put some extra training in throughout January to get back on track after overindulging over the Christmas period, but I wasn’t planning on also having to do it following the Man Flu (a very serious health condition, as I am sure you are all aware!). I hope it didn’t get you too, but there certainly seems to have been a lot about this time around.
In a nutshell, I was floored from the evening of the 27th until New Year’s Day and then left with a very annoying cough. Fast-forward a week, and I then required antibiotics to get rid of said annoying cough. All of this put a decent dent in all things fitness-related. Not helped by receiving an email on the 5th of January highlighting there were 8 weeks until the Brighton Half Marathon!
Anyway, I will put my violin away and stop whinging and focus on the PLAN!
Dear old “Greg” my Garmin coach/AI bot didn’t seem to be able to adapt the plan from where I had been pre-Christmas to post-Man Flu, resulting in the end of “Greg” as my coach. That left me looking around for a new plan, so I asked our physio Martin who is a serious runner what app he uses, and he recommended Runna. This enabled me to set up an 8-week training plan from scratch, going back to almost where I was before I started my training. I will then need to start ramping the distance up again once I am back to where I was pre-Christmas.
The new plan includes 3 runs a week –
1 x Long Run which I set much shorter than I had been running, starting at 7k
1 x Easy run – conversational pace for 5-6k initially
1x Tempo run – 2k warm up at conversational pace 1km “fast-paced” walking recovery for 90 seconds and repeat 3x
Now, these distances will have to increase, but it is really important to listen to your body so you know when you are ready. The best way to do this is to use your heart rate as an indicator and focus on what zone you are running in rather than how fast you are going. This will ensure you don’t overreach and burn out. It also means that recovery is key, so a lot of the obvious stuff applies here, staying hydrated, sleeping (kids allowing!), regular massages and foam rolling. I am also doing a dry January to help give myself the best shot at getting back on track as quickly as possible! So far, I am 4 runs into training again and I am certainly not where I was but each run feels better than the last so I am still hopeful of hitting my sub-2-hour target! The reason I wanted to write about this is that it highlighted to me how a setback like this can make it very easy to simply give up or stop. Especially when you have to take some backward steps, but the key is to refocus and accept that you have to start again. If you do this you will accelerate past where you were before and achieve something you didn’t think you could. It is a lot like stocks and shares they may crash but they very often recover and end up surpassing where they were before they went down. If you stayed the course you would be so much better off but if you panicked and sold up you would have lost money with nothing to show for it.
Keep going, it will be worth it!