scream and shout ’till we work it out

Things have really turned around in the last week, in a good way.

After feeling really flat in the NYC Half marathon a safe plan was to scale back my mileage and recoup. I did NOT take the safe plan. With four weeks to go until the London Marathon I decided it was all or nothing.

The day after the half I had a light 17km run to keep it a recovery day. And then it was ‘on’ for the next seven days. In the past seven days I had four runs over 30km and totalled 227km (140 miles). It was a bit of a gamble and we have yet to see if it will pay off but I don’t think it backfired.

The reason I believe it didn’t backfire is because Thursday’s and today’s sessions went well. I felt the best I have in three weeks.

We decided to run today’s workout at 1pm to take advantage of the warmest time of the day. It was -6C for the workout and the wind made it feel even colder. Welcome to Spring!

After a 6km warm-up Gillis, Mason, Sunseri and I did 45 minutes, 15 minutes and 10 minutes with 4 minutes light jog in between intervals. I pretty much ran the same pace as the NYC half, except the pace today was much more controlled and consistent. In total we got in 33km.

To keep on training hard even though I felt tired I made sure to step-up my recovery activities. Sleep, nutrition, CEP compression tights, MountStream ice leg wraps, massage, physio, foam roller, have all been integral parts of the puzzle, especially sleep! I will also go very light tomorrow to recover from today’s session.

I decided I’m not shaving until I experience double digit Celsius temperatures. At first I figured this would be a week or two. It’s already been over a week and the 14-day forecast in Guelph doesn’t predict anything over 8C. I may be travelling to London John Mason style.

London will likely be warm enough to allow me to shave. Which is good because my beard won’t be big enough to get cheers anyways… In NYC when I was running with Brett Gotcher he was getting a lot of “nice beard!” cheers. Gillis was wearing the NB Canada singlet and getting a lot “Go Canada!” cheers. I wasn’t getting any random cheers. To answer Keldog, no I won’t be wearing the NB Canada singlet in London. Although it would be cool, the higher-ups submitted the black and red 2014 kit to the London Marathon.

Thanks for all the kind words in the comments section over the past week. It’s always good to hear positive feedback.

Three weeks until the London Marathon…