January is also a month where I like to fit in a few running races, 6th of January was the annual Cambridgeshire XC Champs held at Prior Park in St. Neots, with a pretty stacked field and 4 laps around the muddy park it seemed to be a very long 10k, well it turned out to be nearly 10.8km but great fun as always. I managed to finish in a respectable 17th with Josh having a great run and finishing 6th and grabbing a place for the Inter-Countries later this year.
The following weekend (13th January) saw the 4th round of our local inter-club XC league 'The Frostbite Friendly League' 5 miles of mixed terrain around Whitemoor Prison near March, it's a pretty un-testing course being fairly flat, but all good fun none the less and nice to get the legs turning over a bit faster than normal.
Then can the snow, and with it the first cancelled race of the year, the Folksworth 15, this was to be my first proper road race of the year and a good indicator to see how things were progressing ahead of the VLM. With a little surfing an alternative race was soon found, the first of three Wellingborough 15K multi terrain races. After racing and winning the 10K there last year it was an ideal time to up the distance to the 15k. By the time we got lined up on the start line in true XC fashion in my NVH's Singlet and shorts the snow was starting to fall again. 3 x 5k laps of the snow covered course and it was over, a not to shabby 3rd place behind the legendary Hywel Davies...
27th January and it was time for a day of swim coaching, Emily had very kindly treated me to a Swim Smooth Clinic for my birthday and at last, the time had come to literally jump in at the deep end. The session was run by Steve Casson, and involved pool videoing, drills, classroom analysis of our strokes and then back in the pool for more drills and race simulation work.... all in all an enjoyable day and I can away with lots of things to work on, as we all know my swim is my biggest limiter so the hard work continues.
Finally last Sunday (10th February) saw the Folksworth 15 was re-scheduled, after a pretty big week of 16 hours of training I was not really looking forward to a wet and windy 15miles specially after attending a Roundtable Ball the night before. But hay hoo its all good mileage leading up to London. The plan was to try and run a steady even paced run at 5.55min/mi. As normal the gun went off and I shot out the blocks like in a bloody 5k race, it didn't help being downhill and back wind, but I soon settled down running in a small group. It's an undulating course of 2 laps with 3 main hills per lap, but worse than the hills is its exposure and the back straight of about 3 mile was into the wind. On the first lap I found myself running the back straight with fellow Ironman Mat Stephenson, after sitting in close behind him for a while I repaid the honours.. I hate running into the wind..... once round the corning and out the wind it was back to ticking off the miles until that same section on the next lap, this time all on my own, so tooth gritted, head down, and thinking only 3 miles of wind then it's back wind, downhill home (well back wind maybe but there is one last killer hill at mile 14). With a last little effort up the last hill and half a mile back wind to the finish I manage to get 4th place in a time of 1:28:39 some 1:39 faster than last year and bang on my target pace of 5:55min/mi. I even managed a small negative split :-). All in all a good race and the time bods well for my sub 2:45 VLM target...
Next (running) stop, Stamford 30K next Sunday, now this one is a toughie but really looking forward to it and testing out my new Sketcher GoRun2 shoes, which I kindly received last week courteously of the RacetimeUSN race team, they do look awesome. I think they will be the perfect Marathon and IM shoe for this year so big thanks to Racetime and Sketchers for all their great support.
Apart from running I've been maintaining my bike fitness with a far bit of time spend to the rollers and turbo in the mornings before work and most Saturdays morning out on the road with Jimmy who's been cranking up the mileage in readiness for our trip to Nice next month to recce the Ironman bike course.
Thanks for reading this far,,, I'll leave you with my January stats.......... Train hard, train smart..
January's Stats, Tried to maintain my swim volume, and substituted some bike hours to my running.
Duration (h:m)
|
Distance (mile)
|
TSS
| |
Swim
|
20:25
|
32.65
|
925
|
Bike
|
24:23
|
454.45
|
1349
|
Run
|
16:11
|
140.38
|
1359
|
Nice update Paul. Looking forward to covering you and the Racetime team on www.beyondgoinglong.co.uk this year.
ReplyDeleteHopefully see you at the Racetime training day in a few weeks?