On Thursday I was planning on meeting friends in the evening to do a social 7 mile run with a few 1 mile fast pieces. However, it turned out to be my busiest working day of the week and I didn't have any time to do any of my own training. Not so for Friday.
On Friday I just see three clients in the morning, so that my working day is over by 12 noon. I then head over to the Bodywise Studio in Cambridge where I have an hour of one-to-one training with Holly Mackay. You might remember that I spent New Year's Eve piecing together a couple of pilates reformers at Ruth's practice. Well it was time for me to have a workout on the new equipment. I've been going to Holly for about 3 months to try and improve my flexibility and to sort out a number of imbalances in my body. I always knew that my left hamstring is shorter than my right, and that neither are particularly flexible. However, I'm also learning that my right obliques are stronger than the left, I have more mobility in my left ankle, my left leg appears to be slightly stronger, the right side of my back seems to be more dominant, and the list goes on. I'm hoping that working with Holly will help resolve all these issues and that I'll be a better runner as a result. Of course, I could be keeping it in the family and seeing Ruth, rather than paying Holly, but past experience has shown that working with your partner is not as effective (I don't know how Paula Radcliffe does it!). If Ruth instructs me to do an exercise I will challenge her, wanting to know her reasoning. When I'm working with Holly I switch off and do exactly what she asks. I'm sure my clients have the same experience when working with me. I also find that working with Holly is a great way to end my working week. I spend all my time thinking about how I'm going to challenge my clients to help them achieve their goals that it's nice to be able to shut off and just do what I'm told for a change. So, for any of you that haven't tried the personal training experience, I'd recommend giving it a go some time.
After my hour with Holly I grabbed a quick sandwich and headed off to Advance Performance, the best running shop in Cambridge. I'm as guilty as anyone else for not replacing my running shoes as often as I should. I was well overdue a new pair. This was highlighted as soon as I watched the video footage of me running in my old shoes. They weren't providing any support at all. Anyway, I had decided that I was going to buy a new pair of road shoes and some trail shoes. So after trying about nine pairs of shoes on the treadmill, and then running outside the shop with my short listed five pairs of shoes, I finally settled on the two that seemed to suit me best (Adidas Supernova 3 and Brooks Cascadia 5 for the anoraks that really need to know).
Keen to try out my new shoes, I headed out in the afternoon for a steady 10k run past Cherry Hinton Hall and around Cambridge Airport. I wasn't aiming for a fast run, just to run at a pace that felt good. I wore my Garmin to record the run, but didn't look at it once. When I got back home I was really pleased to see that I'd averaged 6'45" per mile (close to my marathon pace). Again, for the anoraks my fastest mile was 6'16" and my slowest was 6'59".
This morning Ruth and I met up with a bunch of our running friends at the Cambridge Park Run. This was to be my third Park Run and Ruth's first. After heavy rain yesterday the ground was very wet, muddy and slippery. A good test for my new trail shoes. My plan was to treat the run as a tempo run and not go out at 5k race speed. However, I always find it really hard to run at a pace slower than I know I'm capable of for any given distance. In the end I found myself holding back a little, but still running faster than my plan. All the time I had a little voice in my head grumbling about the fact that there were people ahead of me that I knew I could beat. I just can not kill my competitive streak. I still managed to finish in a very respectable ninth place in a time of about 19'15" (or thereabouts). Everyone seemed to find the conditions very slippery, but my new shoes performed really well. I had no problems in the mud, but found the wet wooden footbridges to be a little treacherous.
Ruth is now preparing a late cooked breakfast for the two of us. I can smell bacon wafting up the stairs from the kitchen, so I will sign off and grab my food. I haven't quite finished with my training for the day. I plan on doing an hour of kettlebells later today.
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