Contracting in Warrington

I have spent the last few months working in Warrington, and it looks like my contract is going to be extended for quite a bit more. I have had a difficult decision, to carry on working so far from home with one hell of a drive each Monday and Friday, or to hunt for something much more local. The advantage of working where I am is that it is a big customer, guaranteed to pay their bills on time. The only disadvantage is location. That said, quite a number of my colleagues are long distance commuters. One does the journey from London daily. Now the darker, colder (I almost said wetter, but the summer wasn’t great either) weather is here, then getting up on that Monday morning for a four-five hour drive is less and less attractive.

Back to Gym and swimming

Good eating at the B&B has led to a gradual increase in my belt length, and I am starting to see the yo-yo weight loss/gain cycle swing back. So, refusing to give in, I have joined a local gym (in Warrington) and for the last few weeks have managed to get there 4 times per week. A couple of gym sessions and a couple of long swims each week should stave off the creeping waistline. In fact, I have already noticed a small decline.

Cycling at the weekends is on the backburner too, I’m afraid, as Alison has been unable to ride due to her running injury. So, the new cycle roof rack has hardly been used. Oh well, not long till spring.

Drupal odds and sods

I am still enjoying the Drupal CMS, and keep toying with moving this blog back. I have been experimenting with a site with more static pages and less timeline orientated, but still retaining some blog-like features and think that Drupal will give the best of both. I have also managed to do some freelancing on Drupal, so not diluting my skills with yet another system seems a good idea.

iPod Classic

I am saddened to keep hearing rumours that Apple may be dropping the iPod classic as the flash based storage devices have a lot of advantages. I see this, but the 160Gb Classic has enabled me to ditch an external brick I was using for camcorder footage and backups while away from home, so please, please don’t ditch it Apple, until you have at least a couple of hundred gigs of flash on a device.

Well, since I achieved my main goals then I am thinking less and less about where I am on the fitness scale, and it has become something that I am not constantly talking about. But, I thought it time to review where I am.

My weight is still within the range that I set myself, although it is creeping toward the upper end of that range – which may need some maintenance work to stop it from climbing out of control. This is going to be interesting over the next few weeks as my latest contract will involve some hotel accomodation for the first few weeks as I try and find a short-term let. Hotels spell “DANGER”, as the last few times my work led me to stay in hotels then my weight has balooned out of control, vigilence is needed here, and I am a little nervous about falling badly off the wagon.

Over the last week I have picked up a minor chest infection, leading to a bit of a rattly cough. At the beginning it stopped me from running, although I managed to carry on swimming. Since Friday, though, I have resumed the running – with quite a healthy pace yesterday – it hasn’t been pleasant though, when the rattle gets bad and the resultant coughing starts.

My pace is starting to return to the pre-HRM days, but of course I am feeling much better at the end of the run. I want to start pushing up the mileage, as my dream of a November half-marathon is still there. (Can I believe I am saying this?). As an interim milestone, Alison and I may do the Cancer Research 10k in September.

I caught myself telling a colleague today that I went for a short run yesterday, only a mere 5k – and then realised what I had said. I am certainly changing.

Since her difficult 10 miler at Great Baddow, Alison has been coming on in leaps and bounds. She has been promoted to the upper group now, and definitely belongs there and seems to be improving by the week – it was a plateau breaker for her. I wish I could find a plateau breaker for my running pace.

The swimming still feels very strong, and I am doing 2k front crawl a couple of times per week. I don’t see me improving much more without a proper trainer, but it is rare for me to meet another non-club swimmer in the public lane swimming that is faster than me now. I am mainly doing this now as a calorie burner, as further improvement would require a level of commitment that I can’t give it now.

I had the opportunity to go for a London contract recently, and I think one of the things putting me off was that a daily commute from home would leave no time for a fitness program!

WELL DONE ALISON

Alison did the Race for Life again this weekend. This time, because of all the training with the Colchester Harriers she nervously put on her green vest over her normal running gear. I think she was nervous of looking like something she wasn’t. Hah! Silly girl! She proved she should be wearing a running club vest, by coming 18th out of nearly 2000 people.

WELL DONE!!!

Now, she is pondering doing a 10 mile race this weekend coming. Go for it!

I suppose with anything new, it takes a while to work it out, sometimes. The heart rate monitor driven training I have been doing was based on a page called Heart Rate Zones. What I didn’t notice was a link at the bottom of that page to Training Zones!

Both are correct for what they are saying, and since it is training that I am doing I should have been looking at the second page, which basically means that I should have been doing my long runs at a heart rate of 77%, not 70%. These numbers should mean that I should be around the 10:00 pace at the correct heart rate.

Or, maybe, transitioning to a walker!

A problem that I have with things like running is that I want to see continuous improvement – or at worst a plateau. I am finding it hard to motivate myself with my running this week because this isn’t happening.

Over the week, using the HRM for a tempo run and an easy run was fine with paces of 9:28 and 9:35 for 3-4 mile runs. OK, this is slower than I have been going, but I have felt that the HRM was doing it’s job of making me run at the correct pace.

Yesterday I did the “long slow distance” run, which is meant to be at 70% of max heart rate, so it’s going to be slower than the mid-week more intense training. In fact, the first such run was last week at a pace of 10:40 (one of my slowest runs ever, but finishing feeling strong – not knackered). Last week I failed to keep my heart rate at the prescribed rate – this week I thought I’d be able to.

I started off at a casual rate and yet my heart rate didn’t reflect how I felt, shooting up to around 80%, so I had to go slower, even more slower and slower still to get the heart rate down to 70%. I felt I was barely going quicker than a brisk walk. About half way round I got a jeering comment about how slow I was plodding from a car sat in a traffic queue. At this point I am feeling really pissed off, but I continued with the “plan”. I wanted to up the distance to 7 miles this week, but as I was passing a point close to home at nearly 6 miles I thought “sod it”, and gave up. My pace was appalling with a new all-time low of 11:10.

I know that some of this is related to my new training technique of using a HRM, and that I should expect things to go backwards a bit before going forward, but I am so disheartened. What will go first? The HRM? Running?

I have to keep reminding myself of the progress I have made, rather than beating myself up because of perceived poor performance.

In the last 8 months I have changed from someone who found a 10 minute brisk walk (4 mph) tiring and painful to someone who can jog (6 mph) for over an hour without a break. And yet, despite the achievement of hitting 10km, I am disappointed that the pace was so low.

A year ago I would have been stunned at what I can do today, and yet today I want to be something I could never have dreamed of – and that is a runner, not just a jogger.

What is the difference? Well, the difference between the two is very loose and fuzzy. FitSuger says it is a 9 minute mile. In “Beginner’s Running Guide” by Hal Higdon, he says an 8 minute mile. The rec.running FAQ says “the people I pass are joggers and the ones who pass me are runners.”. Another quote from there is that a jogger is someone who worries about the difference.

So, perhaps I should forget it, call myself a runner after all and just set myself a fitness goal instead.

In that case, I want to have a cardio capability that is classed as “Fair” and Running for Fitness defines that as having a VO2MAX of around 35.0, which would mean me doing a 10km run in 56 minutes, so that is my next goal.

I made one of my goals for this year, a 10k training run:

This is the first run I’ve done with a HRM, and I set my target heart rate a little lower that maybe I should, hence I ended up running at a fairly low pace of only 10:30. Next week I’ll be pushing a little harder.

My plan for preparing for this winters half-marathon is to increase my long run by half a mile per week. Last week I failed to do this, as I misjudged the distance and on returning and working it out was disappointed to find I had only managed 5 miles again.

Today, Alison & I went for the 5 mile North Colchester route and I mentioned that an extra half-mile would be nice. So, as we descended Ipswich Road, Alison suggested that we don’t take the footpath down Broadlands Way joining with Cowdray Avenue, but instead carry on down Ipswich road to the roundabout. I realised that by not cutting the corner we would go a little further, but it was a whopping 0.7 miles further. Looking on the map, I can see why as the main road actually doubles back on itself at that roundabout.

As the news about the London Marathon pointed out, it was a hot day which meant that running was a tad hard! About three quarters of the way round – climbing Turner Road – I was flagging badly, and Alison kept offering for me to stop – I suspect it was because she was finding it much too easy and wanted to run off at a more impressive pace. Saying that though, we did the first mile in 8:47 which is very pleasing for me. At this stage in my training, quitting is not an option and I battled on.

As we got near home Alison told me that we had done 5.77 miles in 55:37 so I decided that it was enough, and walked the last couple of hundred yards as a cool down, while Alison proved my earlier suspicions correct my running off and doing another 3.3 miles in less than 30 minutes to achieve a new personal distance record herself. So, we both did well today.

Seeing the runners on the news tonight, I suspect that the heat wasn’t the only reason so many people looked in trouble. I suspect that many first-timers had simply not done enough training, maybe because they ran out of time or were too ambitious. I hope I don’t look the same in November.

Alison is now considering entering the Southend half-marathon in June. I hope she goes for it, as I know she can do it and she could benefit from pushing herself forward!

OK, November may be some way off yet for the Riverside half-marathon, but it’ll come up quick – Alison’s race for life is now only 5 weeks away.

This week I have been running around Warboys, and have now comfortably achieved a 5 mile run…

It’s quite odd running in a place as small as Warboys, as I end up doing multiple laps of the village. At the moment it is 3 laps, which can be quite funny when I see the same people on each lap. My Long Slow Distance runs are at quite a sedate pace of around 9:30 per mile, so I have now started doing the occasional speed work.

On Wednesday I did my first piece of interval training since I transitioned into being able to run continuously. It was a 2 minute running, 2 minute recovery program during which I ran at a gentle jog. The 2 minute runs ended up at a fearsome pace of 7:30 and when I finished I was very, very worn out. This is to the point that I am dreading my next interval run. So, I have decided to go back to the drawing board to make the experience slightly less painful. The main change I am going to make is to make the recovery period a walk, not a run, and to walk until recovered, not to start running again after a fixed time.

I definitely saw the benefit on my next 4 mile run as I managed to pick the pace up to 9:09.

The next change to my program is to make my Sunday runs the long runs, adding on a half-mile per week until I get to the half-marathon distance. Once per week, probably Wednesday will be my interval day and I need to plan how to evolve the intervals as the weeks pass and the final run will be my “easy” run on a Friday, where I’ll run around 4 miles and gently try to push up the pace.