Tag: runDisney

Getting back in the zone

Jess Guth1 Comment

As I write this there are gorgeous smells coming from the kitchen where Kath is making healthy blueberry bran muffins as well as our late lunch/early tea of quorn chilli; we’ve had a lovely morning (after a very long sleep for me) at Bolton Abbey where we went for a roughly 3 mile walk and we have spent most of the time talking about training, the runs we’d like to do from home as well as from starting locations locally. I am in a much better place mentally today. A number of things have contributed to that.

1. The little messages of support and tips on here, Facebook and Twitter and the very generous sponsorship/ donations made to Panthera. Thank you

2. It is Sunday which means weigh-in day and I have lost another pound. If I can shift another 2.2 pound I will drop into the next stone and it is exciting to see that first number go down rather than be an irritating and slightly depressing constant. I will be close to being the lightest I have been in over 3 years and not far off being the lightest I have been in over 18 years.

3. Our next run will be the first run of our marathon training programme. Now yesterday this freaked me out. Today I am excited about this. I am even more excited because Kath has bought me some smileimagey star stickers so I can mark of each run (yes, I know I probably need to get out more – but smiley star shaped stickers!). Here is the first page, blank. I’ll post again when it is full of happy little stars

4. Our first ‘race’ is two weeks today. That was just stupid yesterday but today I see it differently. Today I see it as part of my learning curve. It won’t be fast, in fact it will be very slow but it has been a very long time since I’ve run in a crowd, the timings for when to eat, when to pee, when to warm up…. are all different so it will be a great, if difficult experience. I know I can do the distance. I’ve done it twice now in the last 4 weeks and once I did it when I really really wasn’t in a happy running place.

So, yesterday running  made me miserable, and it really did. Today I feel better. Today I am pleased that the 6.5 miles yesterday haven’t resulted in any niggles or even stiffness. My legs were a little tight but the walk sorted that. Today I am proud of how far I’ve come and (while still totally unfit) how much fitter I am than I was. I am back in that tiny little zone in my head that knows that I can do most things I really put my mind to. It’s a little zone, a tiny one, one that I don’t manage to get myself into very often, one that shuts the door on my depressive black Labrador and on all the doubts, questions and negativity. It’s the zone that knows that this girl can and it is the zone that is learning to shout and be heard over all that other crap. So, Leeds: here’s my number. Look out for me. I won’t be running fast but I will be running because I have decided I am doing this so whether I can or not is actually irrelevant, I am doing it.

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A month to our first race

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A month exactly to our first race – The Leeds run for all 10km. Can’t decide if I am looking forward to it or not. I am sort of keen to see our progress and whether we can post a half decent (by my standards, not by actual runner’s standards!) time. I don’t like crowds though, particularly not at the moment, and I’m a bit worried about how I’ll cope being surrounded by people who actually know what they’re doing. However, I am holding on to the notion that maybe, just maybe we also know what we’re doing. Or at least we are trying to follow the guidance of someone who does by following the RunDisney plans designed by Jeff Galloway.

That brings me to another little rant about Runner’s World (I am actually beginning to quite enjoy reading the magazine and would actually recommend it – my rants say more about me than the mag!). I was looking at the April issue which had something about training which has easy runs/sections and hard sections and less of the middle ground. All sort of made sense (except that ‘easy’ in my case would have to be walking) until I looked at the table for a sample week. According to that table a 6 miles ‘easy’ run would result in 50 minutes of easy running. 8 miles in 65 minutes. What? 6 miles in 50 minutes? I know that’s doable. I’ve seen people do it but that IS NOT an easy pace; that’s an impossible pace for me. Runner’s World is full of stuff that to me just seems impossible. And when everything in a magazine is just so far out of reach it is easy to get completely disillusioned with the whole thing. So I stopped reading and instead took another look at the Jeff Galloway website. Ok, looking at this I do feel a little bit like a runner. Here the numbers make sense, they are possible, even now. We haven’t quite stuck to the run/walk ratio suggested and we haven’t really done the magic mile measurement since the beginning but we are working with the principle of walk breaks from the start and not worrying about having to keep running for long stretches. We are comfortable at 2 minutes running and 30 secs walking for now. It gets me to the end of the longer distances without injury and without feeling that I can’t do it. It means I finish each run strongly and usually feel pretty positive about it even where I’ve had a wobble along the way. Other than when I had my little calf niggle the other day, there hasn’t been a run I couldn’t finish or one I could barely finish.

I also love the fact that his advice is to not worry about time for a first time marathon. He says:

“I don’t recommend that first-time marathon participants try for a time goal. Do the first one to finish, running/walking at a comfortable training pace.”
Yes! I can do that. I actually believe I can do that. And what is even better, the examples he lists include the sort of pace we’ve been working at. Jeff Galloway also says:
“You are the one who determines how much you run and how much you walk. One of the wonderful aspects of running is that there is no definition of a “runner” that you must live up to“
Oh my – is it possible that I am a runner after all?

So do I or don’t I like 2 minutes?

Jess Guth4 Comments

I don’t know the answer to that. On Tuesday I was tired, really tired so we gave running a miss and on Wednesday Kath was away for work and I don’t do running on my own. So I had a two day rest before heading out for 30 minutes after work yesterday. The first two running sections were awful. Legs felt heavy and I couldn’t breathe. Then it got easier. I found it really hard but I didn’t hate it. I had a little look around as I was running and I never felt like I couldn’t do it. I just felt like I was working bloody hard. I ran out of steam a little bit on the last run and couldn’t push for a little sprint at the end but we did do our fastest 30 minutes so far with 2.43 miles. I should have been quite happy with that but I was a little bit grumpy that it wasn’t faster still. We are running for 2 minutes afterall now so we should be going faster overall… So the 2 minute running thing is a bit of a mixed bag. It doesn’t feel like it is much harder than the 90 seconds running when we’re actually doing it but it obviously is and I am being impatient because I want us to be faster and the running to be easier and because I want to be able to do the runDisney marathon now.

Today my right calf muscle was been sort of niggly. Not painful but not just tight either. So no running today. I think my leg will be fine with another day rest but tomorrow we are supposed to do 5 miles. 5 miles! I’m not really sure I can do that. 5 miles running for 2 minutes, walking for 30 seconds -repeat a stupid amount of times… 5 miles. Yeah right.

The thing about pace and the thing about fitness

Jess Guth4 Comments

As I am continuing to find the running quite tough mentally and I really can’t shake off that nagging doubt about being able to do it or the feeling that people are probably just laughing at me I was looking for a little confidence boost, a sign, something that would encourage me to keep going. I found a couple

1. Pace. No, I haven’t suddenly found pace but I finally looked at our runs on the computer after Kath had downloaded them all from her watch. In some of the posts I’ve told you the average pace and the fastest has been 12.something mintues per mile. So, slow. In my mind I had associated that with me obviously running really really slowly, as I would, because I’m really not a runner. However what I hadn’t thought about is that of course we are walking quite a lot. In fact that pace relates to the intervals where we are walking 30 seconds in every 2 mintues. Looking at the fastest pace and tracking the pace throughout the runs tells a slightly different story. I am not actually running at snails’ pace. Our running pace is often around 8.5 minutes per mile. That’s not fast but that is respectable at least! What that means is that as we increase the time we run (and keep the running pace as it is now) as part of these intervals, our minutes per mile time is actually likely to come down to really quite respectable times – well, respectable for someone who couldn’t run the 50metres or so to the post box at the end of the road at the beginning of the year.

2. Fitness is a funny thing. If you don’t constantly attend to it somehow it just disappears. I know this because I have got myself reasonably fit about twice in my life and then lost it pretty much overnight. The other way around is totally different. Improvements in fitness levels seem to just creep up on you. I’ve noticed little things. Our usual 30 minute route finishes along the canal and we then have to walk back up the hill to get home – I’m no longer stopping to ‘admire the view’ half way up; I am happier about walking up the hill on may home from work; I am recovering from our runs much more quickly… It’s the little things that I probably wouldn’t even notice if I wasn’t blogging about our running efforts and everything associated with that.

So, in the middle of all the struggling to get my head around the running stuff there are some positives to hang on to.

Bank Holiday Weekend Running

Jess Guth1 Comment

We’ve done a fair bit of running over the bank holiday weekend. We did 4.25 miles on Saturday and 30 minutes on Sunday and for good measure another 30 minutes this morning. As I mentioned a few days ago I struggled on the last 30 minute run before the weekend.I was therefore absolutely dreading the 4.25 miles. I had lined up every excuse I could think of but then decided that it was just as well to get it over with. It won’t do to be scared of 4.25 miles when I’ll have to do a marathon in 7 month’s time.

We are still running on the flat along the canal rather than risking setting my calf off with hills. So, with the watch set for 30 repetitions of intervals of our 90 second running/30 seconds walking we set off. I hated it. Kath tells me there was lots to see. Lots of ducklings, a few goslings and a heron. I didn’t really take any of them in. I just wheezed my way along. We turned round at 2.12 miles and turning round and heading back gave me a bit of a boost. I think my posture improved and I felt like I just might be able to make it. More wheezing along. With a mile to go my lower legs felt really tight, tight but not painful or twingy – so onwards. We started a running interval again just as we hit the 4 mile mark and I felt ok, in fact I felt pretty strong so I decided that we should try and run to the end – the end I knew would be pretty much bang on at the next bridge. Complete focus on the bridge pulled me towards the end and then suddenly we were there, done. 4.25 miles. Just over 56 minutes with an average pace of 13.13minute per mile.

We had decided to see how our legs felt before making a decision on a Sunday run. When I first got up my legs felt a little weary and we wanted to go out anyway so we thought we’d see how we felt later. We went late afternoon, 30 minutes along the canal in the opposite direction to Saturday. It felt awful. It felt worse than the run I complained about last week. It wasn’t so much my legs, I was struggling for air and it just felt like such as huge huge effort. After turning round at 15.5 minutes I was hoping for that boost. It didn’t come. I was just about  to give up when I heard a lamb at the farm to our right bleat really loudly. It made me jump and laugh and suddenly stopping wasn’t an option anymore. In fact, we missed the last walk and just ran the last 4 minutes straight off. Our pace was close to pre-injury best. 2.35 miles, pace of 12.47. I should have been thrilled, I was just shattered.

Monday – as we continue the madness, we have stepped up the running time.  We’re still following the principles set out by Jeff Galloway  as part of the RunDisney training but we are adjusting the intervals/run/walk ratios as we feel comfortable. We will now do 12 repetitions of 2 minutes running and 30 seconds walking for our 30 minute runs and however many repetition it takes for us to cover the required distance on the distance runs. This morning’s run was a funny one. We went out slowly and really, running for 2 minutes didn’t feel much worse or longer than running for 90 seconds and 30 seconds walking is fine. I didn’t hate the running, I remember ducklings, but it felt like really really hard work. We plodded our way to 2.27 miles with a slow pace of 13.13 minutes per mile but I now know what that run/walk ratio feels like and I’m ok with that.

As a little reminder why I am putting my self through this – we’ll be starting our fundraising in earnest soon – we’re raising money for a charity called Panthera. They do amazing conservation work. Have a look at their website and if you can support us it will help us keep going and it will ensure Panthera can keep doing the brilliant work they do. You can donate via our Justgiving site.