The Work To Home Transition

With just one day left until I’ve achieved my goal of running every day in April, I thought I would find myself desperately searching for the next challenge to motivate myself. Instead, the path ahead feels like an obvious one – to continue with exactly what I have been doing this month.

When it comes to challenges and goals, I’ve found its best not to force them. The challenges which I’m most likely to follow are the ones which excite me. If I just created a challenge for the sake of it, the odds of me giving my all and sticking with it is vastly reduced. So, until either the situation changes or something comes along which really excites me, I’ll just see how long I can maintain this daily run streak for.

Previously I’d always been sceptical of run streaks. Surely you’d progress faster if you gave yourself at least one day off each week for recovery? And indeed, that might be the case. However, I’m struggling to think of a month when I’ve made as much progress since the first few months after I started running regularly in Summer 2014. I’ve smashed my record monthly mileage, and really felt the benefit of that during last Friday’s run. It was the first time for a long time that I felt fit enough to truly enjoy a relatively long run without having to worry about aches and pain before, during or after the run. Often it feels like if I want to build endurance I have to sacrifice speed, but in fact the opposite is true at the moment. I’ve knocked huge chunks of time off my 5k and 12k efforts, and it seems like every interval session delivers segment PB’s on Strava too.

As pleasing as it has been to see and feel this progress, I think I would be continuing with the run streak even without seeing any progress. Right now, the lifestyle benefits it is delivering is more important. I’ve been working from home for more than a month now, and recently watched a guide about working from home. In the guide, one of the key pieces of advice was about making the transition from work to home, or ‘switching off’. Normally that would be my commute home, but without that option, I’ve needed a different activity to help make that transition, and running has been perfect.

When you’ve spent a day starring at a screen, the last thing you want is more screen time, so it is an ideal time to get outside, enjoy some fresh air and some natural light. I can mull over anything from the day which may have been troubling me (I often find that I do my best thinking when I’m running), and normally by the time I get home from my run, I’m ready to not think about work again until my next shift. All of this has helped me find a new routine which is working for me, so as long as I stay injury free, I have every intention of continuing the run streak until the restrictions in the UK are eased at the earliest.

My 2.6 Challenge – 52 minute timed run

As I discussed in Friday’s blog, when I was deciding what to do for my 2.6 Challenge, I wanted something which was as close to my normal Sunday run as possible. Currently that’s a 12km run which takes me a little over an hour, and once I’d decided to incorporate the fact that today was supposed to be the day when I ran my 20th Marathon, I’d found my challenge. 20×2.6 minutes, or to put it differently, a 52 minute timed run.

Not only was this as close as I could get to my normal Sunday run, and therefore shouldn’t disrupt my general training program too much, it also offered me something new. I’ve never entered a timed event and rarely run to time in training. Some of my interval sessions involve timed reps, but these reps never extend beyond 5 minutes, and the only other session where I partially run to time are my recovery sessions, where I may run for 15-20 minutes in one direction before retracing my steps home. Trying to run as far as I could in 52 minutes was a completely new challenge, which is exactly the sort of session which excites me.

I felt good as I set off, running slightly faster splits than I had planned without feeling like I was going too deep. However, this pace led me to my first decision of the run as I approached my anticipated halfway point. I expected to arrive at that point in around 26 minutes, but my watch (which was counting down) was around 27:30.

Ahead was a straight, uphill section of road. To either side, there were side roads I was completely unfamiliar with. If I turned straight away, I’d have to think of where to run beyond my starting point, which would either mean crossing the A429 (which even at these times isn’t guaranteed to be traffic-free), or constructing an extra loop in the village, where people were likely to be out walking. Neither seemed like a great option, so I carried straight up the road, up the hill for another minute before making my turn, thinking that I would probably slow over the second half and therefore would finish close to my starting point as planned.

And indeed, I did soon start to slow. The difficult aspect of the challenge was that I’m so used to thinking in terms of distance rather than time. When you tackle a distance, you know that if you can sustain a faster pace, you’ll finish in a faster time. Running faster might feel difficult, but psychologically you can make a trade-off as you know that the pain will end sooner if you run a faster time. But if you run faster in a timed run, the finish doesn’t get any closer, yet you’ll still have that extra pain.

I managed to rally once I realised that I was at risk of not breaking 50 minutes for 10k. It’s been a while since I broke that barrier (my 10k PB of 38:56 has felt so far away over the past year, when in some Marathons getting through the first 10k in under an hour has felt difficult), but everything about my recent runs suggested I was capable of that today and I wasn’t about to let fatigue stop me. I achieved my goal, passing through 10k in 49:22, but then had the curious challenge of not knowing where my finish line would be.

When you reach the end of a race, the sight of the finish line, however grand or modest it may be, always gives you a boost. You no longer have to mentally visualise the finish because you can see it, and no matter how tired I feel, my pace always lifts a bit at that point. Even on a training run, being able to see your home has a similar effect. But today, I didn’t have a finish line to focus on. I passed my starting point, was thankfully that the A429 was empty and just tried to maintain my pace until my watch started to beep to indicate that time was up.

In the end, I’d managed 10.53km. Given my time was outside 52 minutes at the Draycote Water 10k last month, I’m really pleased with another sign of recent progress made. My pacing today was rather uneven, but given this was the first timed run I’ve attempted, that was to be expected. As a challenge, it was one I enjoyed, and I feel that if I incorporate timed runs into my schedule a little more frequently moving forwards, that can only help my pacing.

Can You Bank Time On A Run?

With running events and running in groups off the table for the foreseeable future, I’ve had to look for other ways to connect with the running community. I’ve joined a few Strava segments, been more active on Instagram, am reading Runners World every month and am eagerly awaiting each new video from The Running Channel on YouTube.

Even though each video is different, there are certain pieces of advice which crop up regularly, one of which is ‘You cannot bank time on a run’. But is that true?

Well, yes, it is. Regardless of distance, the most efficient and ultimately fastest way of running is to maintain a consistent effort level throughout. That doesn’t necessarily mean exactly the same pace throughout as you’ll need to adapt to wind direction, terrain and any other obstacles you face. If your early effort levels are higher than you can sustain due to trying to ‘bank’ time, you’ll pay for this later on, losing more time than you’d initially gained and ending up with a slower overall time. Particularly for longer distances, your slowest pace will be a greater factor in determining your eventual time than your fastest time, which is why banking time doesn’t work.

Yet whilst banking time doesn’t work, I don’t necessarily think it’s the worst race strategy, particularly over shorter distances. Ultimately, it comes down to whether you know where your limits are. If you do, then maintain a consistent effort level. But if you don’t, you run the risk of finishing your run without emptying your tank, and therefore not running as fast as you can.

The only way to discover your limits lie is to go beyond them. After a good week of training, I decided to push the pace early on during Thursday’s 5k effort. My first kilometre was 7 seconds faster than the previous week, which might not seem like a lot, but could be the difference between sustainable and unsustainable. Would I start flagging across the second half of the run?

There’s a psychological edge you get when you set out quickly trying to ‘bank’ time. If you’re successful in running a quicker first half, you know that you don’t need to beat your previous best over the second half. If you match them, you’re guaranteed to improve your time, and you might still improve overall even if you’re slightly off the pace in the second half, depending on how far ahead you were. If you’re hurting, that’s the type of thought you need to focus on to keep pushing and get everything you can out of the run.

Ultimately on Thursday, I didn’t reach my limit. The faster pace I’d set out proved one I was capable of sustaining. I improved by 38 seconds compared to my previous best on this route, and even went 20 seconds faster than my most recent Parkrun.

So, when on my next 5k effort, I’ll once again set out with the intention of banking time across the first half. If I overcook it, then at least I know where my limits are right now. If not, then I’m another step closer to getting back under 20 minutes for the 5k and my ultimate goal of setting a new PB.

My 2.6 Challenge

This Sunday was supposed to be the day that I ran my 20th Marathon, a return to the Shakespeare Marathon course in Stratford where I set my P.B. However, like thousands of other runners, those plans have had to be put on the back burner for the time being. I’ve set myself new goals and have enjoyed pursuing those goals a lot, but it nevertheless feels right to mark the occasion that should have been my 20th Marathon on Sunday.

The 2.6 Challenge is the obvious choice. Set up to help raise funds for the thousands of charities who would otherwise miss out on their supporters raising money on their behalf, it’s not only for a great cause, it will feel good to be part of an event again, albeit a socially distant one. The only real question was what challenge to do?

You can interpret the 2.6 Challenge however you want. In terms of activity, there was only ever one choice for me. But what run to do? 2.6 minutes or 26 minutes would both have been too short for me, as would 2.6k or 2.6 miles. However, given I’ve decided to limit my runs to at most 80 minutes during lockdown, 2.6 hours, 26k and 26 miles were all too far.

Ideally I wanted something broadly similar to the Sunday run I’ve been doing recently, which is a little over 12k and has been taking me a little over an hour. Finally last night during my 5k effort, the answer came to me (I often do my best problem solving during a run) – use the fact it was supposed to be my 20th Marathon.

So, on Sunday I’ll be doing 20 consecutive 2.6 minute runs, or to put it another way, a 52 minute time trial. I’ve managed to reach 10k in about 52 minutes during my recent Sunday runs so that is very much my starting point in terms of target. That Sunday course contains a 2k uphill section, whilst the course I’ve chosen for this Sunday is the flattest, fastest course I can access locally. How much further can I go?

That’s the excitement of the challenge. Running for a specific amount of time always feels different to running a specific distance, even if the overall effort is very similar. Its something I’m not especially used to, at least not for periods of more than 5 minutes, so I will be intrigued as to how my mind and body responds to the challenge.

Are you doing the 2.6 Challenge and if so, what challenge have you set for yourself?

When Running Easy Is Hard

The following statement might sound strange if you were to look through my recent runs on Strava, but of all of my runs this month, the one I am most proud of was Friday’s run. Friday was comfortably my slowest road run this month, slower even than some of my trail runs, and that’s what I’m proud of. My goal for Friday’s run was the easiest pace possible to maximise my recovery, and I achieved that.

Friday’s run was not without its challenges. The first being I started the run on something of a runner’s high, having paced Thursday’s 5k effort near perfectly – a brisk but manageable start which I was able to sustain for the next 4.5k, before finding the energy for a bit of a sprint at the end. I was rewarded with my fastest time over the 5k effort – my improvement was just 7 seconds, but progression is progression. When you’re on a runner’s high it can be tempting to try to run fast every time you run, but I resisted that urge and set out at an easy tempo.

The next challenge arrived when I got outside the village and onto the country lanes. I was now much more exposed to the elements, which included a cool breeze and some light rain. Neither are ideal when you are looking to take things easy, as they bring a temptation to speed up in order to warm up. But as that wasn’t the aim of the run, I reminded myself that I would still warm up at a steady tempo, albeit that would take a little longer.

The next challenge arrived shortly after when I reached the hill. Though this particular hill is never especially steep, it goes on for the best part of 3km with only brief sections of flat or downhill to recover. A slow pace going uphill is easy to achieve, but what is a lot harder is to maintain an easy effort level given that gravity is working against you. Again, it was a case of reminding myself to go as slowly as possible, even if that meant prolonging the uphill section.

Once I’d finally reached the top of the hill, I was presented with new challenges. I was fully warmed up and still feeling very fresh. My pace was naturally increasing thanks to the assist from gravity, and I knew that there were some downhill Strava segments on this section of the route. Would I have a better opportunity to set a PB on these segments? Probably not, but as that wasn’t the aim for the run, I held myself back.

A look at my heart rate data when I got home reassured me that I had stuck to the plan throughout. I spent just 8% of the run in zone 5, which corresponded to just after the steepest sections of the hill (heart rate always takes a bit of time to react to an increase in effort. 71% was in zone 4 and 19% was in zone 3.

Today I felt the benefits of Friday’s run. I ran the same 12km route as I have done on the three previous Sundays, but whilst I eased into each of those runs, today I pushed the pace right from the start. That’s obviously a more difficult way to run, but because I took things easy on Friday, I didn’t crash an burn when I reached the 2km hill in the middle of the route. Far from it in fact, as I set PB’s on both of the Strava segments on that hill. Only one of my kilometre splits was slower than my average pace last week, and overall I knocked 2 minutes off my time. That’s an improvement of more than 5 minutes in 3 weeks, and my 10k split was also one minute faster than my time for the Draycote Water 10k last month.

Progress over both 5k and 12k is very pleasing in the midst of my longest ever run streak, but that progress is only possible through giving as much attention to the recovery runs as the harder efforts. I now have my eyes set on dipping under the hour for the 12k effort, the type of pace I used to take for granted. And in the back of my mind is that first Parkrun back after events can resume, when hopefully I can surprise a few people accustomed to seeing me as a middle of the pack runner with a placing somewhat closer to the front.

Two Weeks Of Running Every Day

Today I reached day 14 of my run streak, meaning that I am very nearly at the halfway mark of my goal to run every day in April. I’m not sure what my previous best run streak was, but I’m fairly sure it was 6 or 7 days, meaning that I’ve already doubled my previous best. And yet perhaps what has struck me most about this challenge is how normal running every day has felt. Some days I wake up with heavy legs, and a few times those legs have still felt heavy at the start of my run. However, once I’m 10 or 15 minutes into the run and my legs have loosened up a bit, I feel good. My body hasn’t felt like it has objected even once to what I am asking of it, which has come as a bit of a surprise.

However, when I take a step back and consider my weekly rather than daily workload, the reason behind this becomes apparent. I feel like I have been very sensible in my approach to this challenge, specifically in terms of reducing the length of my longer runs. Currently it looks like I will end up doing about 5-10km more in April than I did in March, a month when I ran on 22 of the 31 days. 5-10km is nothing over the course of a month, so from a mileage perspective, I’m not really asking any more of my body than I did last month.

The reason why I wanted to attempt a run streak in April was because those of us in the UK are only allowed to go outside to exercise once per day currently. I therefore wanted to make the most of that daily opportunity by running as often as I am allowed to, and that has felt like a good decision too. It has given me a reason to go outdoors each day and has helped what currently feels like a healthy daily routine whilst I work from home. When combined with my lunchtime yoga sessions, it has helped me to compensate for the calories I’m not burning through walking. In fact, it has more than compensated for those calories, as I have actually lost almost 2kg since I started working from home. Not having the temptation of just popping to the shop for some chocolate or an ice cream has also helped in that regards, and I’m now finally back to what I regarded as my ‘racing weight’ last year.

Whilst the challenges have maybe not been as great as I had anticipated, they have still been there. Most significant has been the fact that a lot of my runs have felt like they have been at the same pace. My slow runs in particular have been too fast, something which is a bigger issue than it sounds. With no true rest days, I have to incorporate recovery sessions into my weekly runs. Go too fast during these sessions and when you come to a session where you want to push hard, there won’t be as much left in the tank to do so. I found this out on my 5km effort last Thursday. I set out a bit slower than I had done on the previous two weeks, planning to push hard over the final 2km to make up the lost time. Yet when I came to try to raise the pace, nothing happened. Instead, I ran a fairly evenly paced 5km, something I might have been happy with had that been the plan. However, given that my ultimate goal is to come out of lockdown running faster 5k’s than I was running before lockdown, it was frustrating to come away from the run with a slower time.

Progress is never a perfect upwards curve, and what is important is that I learn the right lesson from this minor setback and make the necessary adjustments to get back on track. Hopefully I’ve done that by identifying the need to run my recovery runs slower, and I mostly managed that today despite a strong wind which constantly seemed to be trying to disrupt my rythym. I can also take encouragement from the progress I’ve made in other areas, particularly over longer efforts. I’ve done the same 12km course for the past three Sundays, and improved my time by 2 minutes on my second attempt and by a further minute on my third attempt. I’m now running 12km at a pace faster than my 5km pace back in November, and whilst I’m still some way off matching my Marathon P.B. pace, yet alone my Half Marathon P.B. pace on these runs, I’ve enjoyed testing my pace over a longer effort. It’s something I didn’t really do at all last year, when my approach going into any run longer than 30 minutes was to take it as easy as possible, and it leaves me feeling optimistic about what sort of times I could aim for over a Half Marathon or Marathon once running events are able to resume.

How long off that will be remains to be seen, so for the time being I am just going to keep using my Thursday 5k efforts and Sunday 12km runs to monitor my progress and guide what changes, if any, I need to make.

My Lockdown Training Plan

Yesterday I received the sadly inevitable news that the Race to the Tower event in July has been cancelled. Given that completing my first Ultra was arguably my biggest goal for the year, that news has come as a bit of a blow. There are other Ultras of course, some of them scheduled late into the year when hopefully things will have returned to something approaching normality. However, doing my first Ultra in Winter or even late Autumn isn’t exactly the experience I had imagined, and given my entry for Race to the Tower has been deferred until 2021, it seems like the best option is just to postpone this specific goal and go again next year.

If I’m completely honest, I also had a sense of relief when the announcement came through. Doing any form of training at the moment is challenging, but when the event in question is a 52 mile trail run, I don’t see how I would have been able train adequately for that challenge. I had plans to drive off into the countryside to do hit the trails for multiple hours at a time, but that’s not possible under the current guidelines. Staying local doesn’t offer the variety of training I would have needed, and in any case, I feel like any form of exercise of more than 90 minutes really goes against the spirit of the current guidelines, even if a specific time limit for the one form of exercise per day has not yet been imposed. Had the event gone ahead, it is likely that I would have been going in massively undercooked, and therefore would I have really had the experience I was hoping for?

With one of my main goals for this year now placed on the back burner, I need a new one to give a focus to my training over the coming weeks. Given there is still so much uncertainty regarding when running events will resume, I’ve decided to keep things simple. Once Parkrun resumes, I want to be in a position to run faster times than I have done so far this year. Whilst I’d love an improvement of minutes rather than seconds, how realistic that is will clearly depending on how long this training block goes on for, so I’m not setting a specific time goal right now beyond beating my 2020 best of 23:42.

I’ve also set myself the shorter-term goal of running every day in April, and this programme of shorter but more frequent runs should hopefully complement my goal to run a faster Parkrun time quite nicely. Finding variety in training isn’t easy right now, as even some of my local routes have had to be ruled out because maintaining social distancing throughout is particularly tricky, though there are a few routes I am happy with. The trick will be to use these routes for different types of sessions. For example, I have a 5.5km route which I used to only use as a route for recovery runs. However, over the past two weeks I’ve used the same route for a progressive pace run, which is a rather different experience despite being on the same route.

I am however planning to keep repeat two of my sessions every week. The first is my ‘long’ Sunday run, which throughout lockdown will be 12km. The goal for this session is for the whole run to feel ‘easy’. If it does, then that’s a good indicator that training is going well and I might even be able to increase the intensity or duration of one or two of the sessions. If the run feels difficult, then that tells me that I need to dial things back across the week, because the route itself is not especially challenging.

The second repeat session will be a 5k effort. I’ve managed to find a great route to do this, starting 1km from home, perfect for a warm up and cool down either side of the effort. Just like the Warwick Racecourse Parkrun, it is an out-and-back route, with a ‘hill’ (which is actually a bridge over the M40) to go up and down just before and after the turnaround point. The rest of the route is virtually flat, so the overall profile is pretty similar to the Warwick Racecourse Parkrun route, and because it avoids residential areas, maintaining social distancing hasn’t proven to be a problem so far. That means that it is a 5k effort which I should be able to really attack, and so should be a really good indicator of the type of time I can aim for during my first Parkrun after they resume (which won’t actually be the first Parkrun itself, as I’m planning to volunteer at that event instead).

In terms of cross-training, whilst my options are again fairly limited, not have to commute to and from work all week has freed up some time which means I should always be able to fit a good yoga session into my day. Currently I’m doing those sessions during my lunch hour (we still have those, even working from home) with my runs immediately after I’ve finished my shift, which has worked pretty well so far.

Right now, I’m feeling strangely optimistic regarding keeping fit during lockdown. There’s a clarity to my plan, my goals feel very realistic and many of the time pressures which can make sticking to a training plan difficult have been removed.