Tuesday 8 May 2012

No Spain, No Gain

You’ll know that during the year I take the occasional trip abroad. These trips are generally in the interest of doing some specific peaking with my training, and generally involve some training in hot climates. I used this tactic to good effect two years ago when I specifically went to Turkey, mid summer, to train hard in hot temperatures. I did some of my toughest sessions in temperatures above 30C. It worked, I got the bronze in the European Masters 10000m, though I was surprised how much hotter it was in Hungary than it was in Turkey. The place I generally go to is Spain, to Ciudad Quesada. It’s there I went to this weekend, as I have some important races coming up.

But first let me take you back to what has been going on these last two weeks, since my last blog. Well last week was a bit hectic as I picked up a number of new clients and had some returning occasional clients, all in a 4 day week. So a bit of juggling around to fit everybody in and also try to get in my own training, which meant I had no time to write a blog. So I couldn’t tell you about Katy’s marathon.

Katy was running in the Manchester marathon and had asked me to help her to get under 3:45. Katy put in a lot of hard work and on the way she’s been running well at 10k and the half marathon. Come the day it was a shocker, persistent rain and very cold temperatures, but despite that Katy ran really well, achieving her goal with 3:39.45. Understandably she was well chuffed with that, after she’d thawed out, and so was I. Ray, unfortunately, had to curtail his plans because of the flu like symptoms he was suffering from, earlier in the week, but we did manage to pay a visit to the exhibition, on the Saturday. There I caught up with some old friends and spoke with Ron Hill. Despite the fact that I do some work for the companies he set up I’ve not spoken to him before. He comes across as unassuming and can be seen at many events across the North West, I bought one of his books too, just haven’t had any time to read it yet.

With Manchester out of the way I have my next interest in the Edinburgh marathon. I’m sure I’ll know lots of my Edinburgh friends taking part, but most importantly for me another of my clients, Rich, is heading there to run it. I did some work with Rich around last September/October, getting him used to how hard he’d have to train. Since then he’s been using my schedules, but coming close to the marathon Rich wanted a session. I worked out something I thought would be appropriate and it worked, giving him just the boost he needed, a few days later he did his Killer Session, successfully. The session I did with Rich pushed me close to my own limit, I’ve not been doing that length of session for a while and Rich is not that much slower than me over 10k. So the next day I was intending to do an easy 8k on the treadmill, at Cottons. But I found myself with a little more time so decided to run 10k instead. I set off easy, as planned, but I’m still not happy on the treadmill and, unlike all the other people running alongside me, I didn’t have earphones. The only way I could think of to relieve the boredom was to get the run over quicker. I didn’t want to run any less, I’d set my mind on 10k, so that meant I had to crank up the speed. So I cranked and I cranked and I kept cranking every time I felt too comfortable, and, despite the easy start, I did a good negative split and ended up with a 35:21 10k run.

Then it was off to Spain. We’d decided to see how a long weekend works so flew out of Manchester on Thursday evening. This meant we arrived at Alicante quite late, along with two hen parties and a stag party. It was quite a noisy flight but this time I had my head phones in and relaxed whilst listening to Wishbone Ash. I trained hard in Spain, I can feel vitality coming back to me, it’s nearly two years since I hit my Over 40 peak and since then I’ve had niggle after niggle. For now I seem to be managing the knee niggle, the main culprit, and I’m getting faster and fitter, and this is bringing the confidence back to me. I’m beginning to believe I can achieve again, watch out there’ll be some SMART goals coming soon, maybe even some THICK ones.

Then, all too soon, breakfast in Spain in 24C was a distant memory as we arrived back at Manchester to a windy 12C. And then back to work, a session with Ray, now thankfully on the comeback from his illness, and another week of cramming clients into four days. And that’s why this is such a short blog.


Written by Roger Alsop

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