Training Mon 24th November - Sun 30th November

So my little toe is still not happy!! It's surprising that an angry wound on a swollen toe didn't take to a ten-mile race through muddy and sandy bogs a little better! I got no sleep Sunday night as every time my toe touched the duvet I woke up. I tried to create some form of elevated leg sling, but only succeeded in waking the rest of the house.

Monday’s training was a no go. I spent the day covered in salt water and TCP! But it seemed to be helping. The wound was healing a bit and the swelling had all but disappeared. I forgot about Tuesdays easy morning run and put all my toes efforts on completing the evening track session. Far from being able to ease the toe in, I was faced with an increased workload. My coach had upped our total session distance from the usual six or seven thousand metres, to ten thousand, which is quite a jump! But I was game, and thankfully much like my trail race it was freezing cold, which numbed my toe a treat.

No sense, no feeling - just like the head of a long distance runner! The ten thousand meters was broken up into an initial 3 x 1600m, a 1200m, another 1600m, an 800 and a final 1600. When the format was read out it all sounded a bit daunting, big distance, lots of reps, and too much to remember! However, the impact was softened by alternating the reps between a hard and a steady/hard pace. It was actually quite enjoyable. I was able to relax and recover on the slower reps then regain focus for the hard ones. I was hitting the targets and feeling good throughout. But it was tough. The distance slowly wore you down, you could really feel it on the last couple and I knew I was working hard and ready to blow on our last lap.

For me this was closer to replicating a race progression, namely a longer, slower progression of fatigue. The oxygen dept and lactate build up only come through strongly close to the end of the run.

Pacing was also crucial much like an actual race. In a shorter session you can get away with pacing too fast, but in a session of this length any over-exertion is going to cause the pain to be two fold at the end. As for the toe, I only became aware of it on the last rep, but by that time everything was hurting a bit, from my head to my toes, so it just joined the queue! For the rest of the week toe-wise it was a case of slow healing. Each run knocked the recovery back a bit, but in between sessions things were looking a lot better, the situation was being managed well, eventually it would be fully healed.

Training got back to normality. Long recovery runs on Wednesday, and a fifty-minute run, incorporating 10 x 1 minute efforts, on Thursday, followed by easy runs on Thursday and Friday evening.
Saturday’s session in Richmond Park was a hard 15-minute tempo run, 5 on the steepest and slippiest hill in the whole of London! and a final 5-minute tempo to finish. All aided by a strong, freezing cold wind. It was one of those days I wish I'd parked much closer to the park. In between reps and on my cool down I was dreaming of my car and its heater. But the work got done and it should all toughen me up. I closed the week with a mid-afternoon 90 minutes on Sunday. The sun was shinning, I felt no pain from my toe, I was relaxed and really enjoying my running. If it could be like that every time, I'd be a truly happy runner!