Hot off the blocks - Marathon Week Two

After the not-so-restful rest week, it was time to get back to the plan. And boy, was it a toughie this week:

• Monday – rest

• Tuesday – track session – 3x (800/400/600/200m), 90 seconds active recovery (jogging, rather than standing still), plus run there and back

• Wednesday – easy 60 mins

• Thursday – tempo (10 mins warm up, sustained effort eg 10/20 mins at marathon/half marathon paces)

• Friday – rest

• Saturday – 60 mins jogging to volunteer at parkrun

• Sunday – 75 minutes

The plan is split into three-week blocks, so this was the first. And while it was a relief to see the back of the rain, a heatwave was in full swing. So naturally, we all decided to spend the evening sprinting around a running track in the blazing sun. And to make things even better, we did 6km of intervals, rather than the usual 5km. Luckily, there weren’t any über long intervals, varying between 800m to 200m, with the idea that you run the shorter distances faster than the long ones. Job done, onto the next day.

Wednesday is always an easy 60 minutes, so running at a conversational pace. This often feels strange after sprinting the night before but it’s a good way to build volume into the plan and recover the legs.

Then Tempo Thursday. When I first saw these on the plan, I thought they looked horrific.

• Firstly, they’re long.

• Secondly, there seems to be lots of different things to remember.

• And thirdly, it’s the third day of running in a row.

But it turns out, the variety keeps it interesting and the running watch seems to tell you what to do.

How it works

You start with a warm up, sometimes 10 minutes, sometimes more. Then there will be a sustained or tempo effort, in this case four lots of three minutes at a very hard pace, three minutes easy pace. Then 10 minutes at a hard pace, 5 minutes easy. Another 10 minutes hard and 10 minutes cool down. Complicated, right? They get easier from here, trust me.

As you can imagine, it’s always quite a relief to finish Thursday’s run, as generally the faster efforts are done for the week.

And finally, the weekend. On Saturdays, I’m alternating between volunteering and running at parkrun – and this week was the former. So I do my usual 5km jog down there, add 5 hill sprints in the middle, and do another 5-6km to bring up the 60 minutes. Sunday was a long run but just an hour and fifteen – long enough in this heat.

Onto next week – where I explain how to go off plan without going off plan…

Total time/km/miles: 5 hours 35 minutes. 65km. 40 miles.