Oh boy if you love a graph you are in for a treat this week! Last weekends training was tough due to staying out too late and having a few too many beers – I didn’t have that problem this weekend and it made a huge difference (massive surprise, I know). My Saturday bike ride was a lot of fun even though it pretty consistently rained the whole way round. I tried to spend more time in the drops, which I’m sure contributed to me going a bit faster. My average speed was up at 15.6mph and I had plenty left at the end. I did another sufferfest video on Thursday on the turbo, those things totally thrash me, but i’m convinced they are working.
[sgpx gpx=”/wp-content/uploads/gpx/activity_282106704.gpx”]
My long run on Sunday also felt pretty good, it was windy and cold but handily the wind was behind my as I was coming back which always makes you feel like you are flying along. Once I got back I realised I was – the last 2 miles were sub 8 min/mile pace. It wasn’t long ago I dipped under 9 min/miles. I decided to look back at my average speeds for the training and see whats going on:
My average heart rate is staying the same (I couldn’t get it looking right on google docs, but trust me) and my speed is going pretty consistently up (apart from the weeks where I’ve felt poorly/a bit hungover). I’m really not sure where this is going to end up, but it’s pretty interesting to think I might be training way above my previous marathon pace by the end of this (my average long run pace was about 8:45 min/miles for last years VLM). I wondering what all this training might have done for my 5km, 10km and half marathon times, I’m pretty excited to find out once I finish!
The above graph is slightly skewed because it’s my average across all runs, the recent ones have an element of speed work that is pushing the speed up on mid week runs, but the table below is just long slow sunday runs and they pretty consistently are improving:
[table]Date,Pace,Avg HR
12/16/2012,10:10,156
12/23/2012,10:08,159
12/30/2012,09:20,159
1/6/2013,09:16,159
1/13/2013,09:01,159
1/20/2013,09:20,161
2/3/2013,09:21,163
2/10/2013,08:52,160
2/17/2013,08:46,161
3/3/2013,08:56,154
3/10/2013,08:29,159[/table]
In other news, I am fairly tired of the cold weather now. I have not really done a ride where I haven’t come back absolutely freezing yet. On Saturday my quick change to run was not so quick due to having to defrost my hands and feet in the bath! This is not the first time this has happened and judging by the weather today, may not be the last.
I didn’t get any swimming done this week as it was cancelled at the last minute on Sunday, although that did have another benefit – sometimes I think Pilla must be mad for putting up with all this training, and other times I thing she understands. On Sunday she suggested I wash my very very dirty bike in the bath which made for a very satisfying Sunday afternoon de-gunking my bike. Just another one of the reasons why she is ace :).
As usual the actual details are here.