47 days til London - under 5 weeks until I taper

Feeling like I might have this cold forever. Didn’t eat well over the weekend… chips and beans and eggs while watching Liverpool misfire against Charlton on Saturday, chicken and cheese quesadilla sat pm, cookies late sat night, junk nibbles sun night in front of the Oscars. Two late nights back to back sat and Sunday as well. So I felt a bit rubbish all day Monday. Put in a reasonably solid 11.5 Sunday morning on the trails, and then took a nap Sunday afternoon instead of doing a double. 130+ for the week so it’s not like I needed he mileage. Easy 12 Monday morning, and then I met Erik in the early evening and we jogged out two miles to c&o and then put in 2X15minutes tempo runs out and back on the trail. He dropped me pretty quickly and my legs didn’t want to open up at all. I really had to concentrate to keep my stride long and stop it from tightening up. I doubt I ran faster than 5:40’s…

The worry I have now is that it really does take me a huge amount of effort to hit my marathon pace outside of a race. My goal pace of 5:45’s aren’t coming as easy as I’d have liked. I’ve not really stopped for long enough during the last 16 weeks to actually taper and then gauge how a taper would give my legs a chance to store up a bit of fast in them. It’s all going to come down to a magic taper at this point. I wonder how much extra speed I’ll get out of my legs through merely giving them a two week taper? I wonder how much faster I’ll be just by being at the race I’ve been thinking about and aiming for, for the last half a year… I’m tempted to taper for about 2 or 3 days before the National Capital Half marathon to see if that allows me to run a good time. Then again, if I run rubbish there, then it’s just going to depress me (just as running badly in the Philadelphia distance run last year really pissed me off). There is an 8k this Sunday in dc, but I’m going to do a hard 23 Saturday morning so the 8k, time wise, won’t matter. Then there’s a 10k the next week… and I think I’ll run the 10k, rest 10 minutes, and then go back out on the course and run it again (hopefully won’t get in trouble for doing this). But then there’s the half marathon in three weeks time and then cherry blossom 10miler in 4 weeks. Do I take those times and work out what sort of marathon shape that puts me in and re-assess my goals? If those times predict I’m only in, say, 2:35 marathon shape do I go out in London to run a 2:35 rather than try to run a 2:30 and then from 17 miles onwards hold on for dear life?

No track this week or for the next 5 weeks. Bad timing as this is when I could really do with being made to run short fast stuff. This being the Anaerobic Training phase and all that.

Ah well. Injury-wise… nothing really bothering me. Right foot still is bruised but since I’ve folded the tongue of my shoe back under the laces it’s getting better every day (the tongue was knocking against the painful bit and apparently aggravating it – I’m so delicate the tongue of my shoe appears to be able to cause an injury). My left foot is in it’s best shape for over two months. I think the new shoes really helped, and being stricter about sticking to trails. There’s still localised pain if I rub the first metatarsal but I can clench my toes about 70% now… two months ago I couldn’t clench them at all. My groin is very tight and I feel pain in the lower abs, but I’m just being better about stretching after running to see if that helps me. I think that the additional speedwork talking. I only used to get that pain after races. Now I can get it from hard training. Isn’t this just showing I’m working harder in training? No? Ah well. It’s all going pretty well really. Only complaining about the small things.