Second week of Boston Marathon training done

Didn’t write much about my first week of training as it was all a bit ad hoc around Christmas and family travelling. Nice run around the weal of Kent on Christmas morning was the highlight. Nice crunchy frozen mud and only saw one human over the 7 miles.

So skipping straight into week 2 then. The plan for the week was to start dragging the long run back up into double figures. So the plan for the week looked like:

Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun	Total
	5	5	5		5	10	30

Didn’t quite work out like that. Tuesday (New Years Day) was a visit to Beeston ParkRun with Mrs BeestonRunner for her first ParkRun experience. Ran round with her for a nice steady 35 minutes. Despite no alcohol on New Years I was still pretty tired (age and lurgy) so just wandered home, giving 3 miles rather than 5

The aforementioned lurgy kicked in hard the next day. I was meant to be back in the office, but not wanting to subject my colleagues to the hacking, snorting and potential germ warfare I spend it working from the kitchen table with my cold survival kit to hand:

I was still keen to try a run that evening, but Mrs BeestonRunner provided the voice of sanity and I stayed wrapped up on the sofa instead.

Thursday, the cold had lifted enough that I went for a loop round Attenborough Nature Reserve. Fairly steady run sticking to the drier solid paths. Clocked up a steady 7 miles with the sun going down. Could have done with the headtorch as we’re still not that far from the solstice

Saturday morning we were back at Beeston Park Run. This time we were running seperately. This was one the days when they had pacers. Out of the gate I latched onto the 20 minute pacer to see how far off my old pace I was. All going well for the first 2.5km and then the remnants of the lurgy showed up, had to pull over to hack up some phlegm and then rejoin at a better pace. Overtaken by the 21 minute pacer just before the turnaround ramp, but kept him in sight till the finish to get in for 21:09. Not bad for no speed work and 4 pints of Totally Brewed IPA in the Star the night before! Mrs BeestonRunner dropped 1:20 off her time as well, so all good there.

Sunday morning up fairly early and out the door for a long run. 10 miles was on the cards so headed off for a lap of the Big Loop to keep to a decent surface. Nice morning as it was starting to brighten up. Nice to see lots of other runners out and about. By the time I got back to home I’d gotten to 10.9 miles

Felt good most of the way round, though it got hard from 8 miles in to keep form. Not sure if this was because of distance or the after effects of Park Run the day before. Will have to keep on eye on that as the Sunday long run is the one I really need to nail to get round Boston Marathon

So the final scores for the week were

Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat	Sun	Total
	4.2	8.5	4.2		5.3	18.1	40.6

So only a couple of miles down, happy with that. Next week things get slightly longer and adding in a couple of gym sessions to try and keep the old age stuff at bay as well.