10 mile milestone

It's week 5 of my training and today I did my first 10 mile run.

It felt good though I seem to be having some problems with the toenails on my right foot. By the end of the run my sock was almost completely claret. I'm hoping that I've not bought slightly too small shoes. They feel perfect. But there must be something wrong somewhere.

I've now got a new mp3 player. It is a very cheap Chinese imitation of an iPod shuffle. At 12 pounds it seems like a bargain.

Recently I've been listening to a mix put together by Villa called Silverlining. It's a collection of electronica from 2010. And well worth a listen.

Other favourites for running are the Black Angels, a neo-psych band from Austin Texas. (Plus they are really nice guys too. I met them after a gig in Bournemouth once and had a little chat with them)

The Pixies, one of my very favourite bands just don't work for me at all. Not sure why they don't, but I don't enjoy listening to them whilst running.

I thought maybe Black Francis screaming about UFO's and bizarre biblical tales might inspire me to fun faster, but alas no.

But then I guess it'd be kind of ironic if Black Francis wrote good music to exercise to. He doesn't look like the running type somehow. (Actually I met him once too. He wasn't very friendly)

New things

I've been running seriously for a few weeks now, so I thought I'd better get some some decent shoes.

A trip to Up & Running and after trying on several pairs and my gait and running style analysed on the treadmill I left £85 lighter and with brand new a pair of brooks defyance 4.

I've never spent any where near as much on any form of footwear. But they are a definete improvement on my £25 2 year old knackered Nike Dart VI's. Very comfortable and very supportive.

I've also bought a fancy GPS and heart rate monitor watch. It;s great to know exactly how far, how fast, how long and where I've been running. After every run I download the information to my computer which plots it all on nice looking graphs and comparison tables. Clever stuff.

Warming up for a Winter run

With training runs getting longer and temperatures getting cooler I am starting to appreciate the full benefits of a solid warm-up. I have noticed in the past, particularly with Taekwondo training, that I perform a lot better in a session with a substantial gap between the warm up and the proper session start. When I was training 3 times a week I would try to complete a full 10 minute warm-up and a 5 minute rest before the actual session warm up began.

The problem with applying this approach to running is that I am used to running as being the warm up for another activity, working heart and lungs without tiring the muscle groups needed for the actual exercise. I have experimented with using the first two miles of a longer run (over 5 miles) as the warm up, followed by a short walk for approx. quarter of a mile to ease off before the rest of the run.

While this has been fine as prep for a longer run, I have found myself struggling to hold a restrained pace on the first two miles of a short run (5 miles), then hitting a wall where I have to slow down to recover for a few minutes before carrying on at a more controlled, stable pace. This should not be needed for what is effectively a sprint.

To combat this I am looking at warm ups I can do indoors prior to a short run, focused mainly on working my upper body to get my heart and lungs engaged, leaving my legs fresh to push hard in the run.

With BST coming to an end and the lack of street lighting in Princes Risborough I will have to wait until I move house in a week to try this out.

the beginning

It started as a sort of joke I sent Jason an email suggesting we should enter Gloucester marathon, Jason called my bluff, and so it began...

I've known Jason for quite a long time. We went to school together. Though this is a slightly misleading statement.

I don't ever recall actually seeing or speaking to him at school. I do remember reading about him in the school newsletter as the unfortunate exchange student that had his appendix removed in a German Hospital, but that's as close as it got.

5 years later when placed in the same AS Level Maths class I finally met this elusive figure, a friendship developed based mainly on playing copious amounts of shithead (a card game) and eating spaghetti hoops on toast (often at the same time).

This is the third part in a trilogy of challenging and or stupid things.

First was hitchhiking to Fort William, climb Ben Nevis and hitch back. This seemed like such a fun, adventurous and most importantly cheap way to spend a week in the Easter holidays, and it sort of was.

We made it to Fort William, Climbed Ben Nevis in the snow. In fact nothing went wrong until we got back down to Carlisle. Where we got in a car which had little in the way of brakes being driven at 90mph by a hysterical woman with beard and boot which contained around 15 subway sandwiches. The adventure came to an abrupt end soon after and we got the train home.

2009's sequel was a bike trip from Bournemouth to Barcelona. Almost entirely fuelled by cous-cous, brie and pain aux raisins we covered 2719 km with little other than getting lost in a cow farm in northern Spain for a whole morning, and it taking 2 weeks to shake off an unwanted travelling companion this went rather smoothly.

Both of these seem incredibly straightforward and dare I say easy compared with the idea of running for 26.2 miles in one go...