It never pays to be optimistic when it comes to the British weather. We had some lovely Spring like weather earlier in the week, but it has since returned to being cold and damp. I was hoping for dry weather over the next week, in the hope that the off-road sections of the Cambridge Boundary Marathon won't be wet and slippery. Unfortunately, the weather forecast for the week ahead is not good.
I've been easing off the running in the last week as part of my taper towards the second marathon of the year. Just as well this was part of the plan as the first three days of the week were very busy and I had little time to train. I managed to get a quick kettlebell workout on Monday. The following two days I had to be content with running with my marathon client on Tuesday and running with the Sweaty Betty ladies on Wednesday.
Tuesday and Wednesday were probably the high points of the week with regards to the weather. I was even tempted to declare Wednesday as the start of Spring. My clients seemed to be in particularly chirpy moods. There was a lot of good natured banter going on in my lunch time kettlebell class.
I think that on Thursday I must have either forgotten that I was tapering towards my next marathon, or I was just feeling the need for a hard workout. But instead of one hard workout I had two. In the morning I managed to summon up the energy for a hard kettlebell training session. I then did a lot of kettlebelling myself at lunchtime whilst teaching a class, followed immediately by putting two clients through an interval training session, whilst being scrutinised the whole time by a wallaby in the Shepreth wildlife park. Must have been one bored wallaby.
In the evening I met up with Jamsheed, Andy and Paul for a run. We expected a couple of the girls to turn up, but they cancelled at the last minute. Andy was keen to do a Yasso 800 training session, so the four of us headed off to Midsummer Common where we know that a triangular configuration of the footpaths is almost exactly 800m in length. The idea is to run 800m as fast as possible for a total of 10 times, with just a 2 minute recovery in between each fast interval. It's a tough workout and it is definitely preferable to do it with a group of friends so that you can egg each other on to complete the next hard piece of running. It's a good test of your level of fitness. It is also said that your average time for all ten intervals in minutes and seconds equates to what you should be able to do in a marathon in hours and minutes. I managed to average 2 minutes 49 seconds for the 800m intervals, which is suppose to indicate that I can run a marathon in 2 hours 49 minutes. I wish that were true.
My two hard training sessions on Thursday left me feeling very stiff on Friday. I also found it really difficult to sleep Thursday evening. My body was feeling too awake. I don't normally train in the evening, as it's usually the time when I'm busiest training other people. I'm hoping to keep Thursday evenings free until Easter so that I can continue to meet the rest of the running gang on a regular basis. I'm guessing it will take me a few weeks to adjust to training hard late in the day.
I met Holly as usual on Friday for my weekly one-to-one Pilate's session. I am starting to notice real improvements to my flexibility. It will still be a long time before anyone nicknames me Billy Elliot, but things are definitely moving in the right direction. It was also useful having a good stretch following the previous day's activities.
I was going to go to Park Run this morning. But I woke up with my butt muscles still a little achy, so I thought better of it. I had the sense to remind myself that I'm supposed to be on a taper. I plan to do an easy 10 miler tomorrow morning. I'm now feeling super keen to get the next marathon of the year out of the way. Roll on 27th February.
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