The Cov Half 2023

The main question running through my mind this morning ahead of the Cov Half was which pacing strategy to adopt. At the Kenilworth Half last month, I went for the safest pacing strategy, heading out at a very easy pace which I knew I could comfortably sustain through to the finish, knowing that I could lift the pace across the second half if I felt good. It is the strategy I have used for most of my recent Half Marathons, albeit many of those were on hot Summer days where a cautious approach is always wise.

However, on a pleasant late October morning, part of me wanted to go with a more aggressive pacing strategy. My legs felt really good yesterday and my stamina proved sufficient to allow me to finish the Yorkshire Marathon strongly two weeks ago, both of which encouraged me to think I could go quite a lot faster than Kenilworth. The Coventry Half Marathon route is also ideal for a more aggressive pacing strategy, since almost all of the hills are covered within the first 8 miles. With a huge range of pacers to choose from, I lined up behind the 1:35 pacer. My plan was simple, stick with the pacers for as long as I could and don’t think about lifting the pace until after 8 miles.

The first kilometre was chaotic. The city centre section of the course is the first and last kilometre, and contains a lot of twists and turns, changes of surface and also some sections where the road narrows considerably. It felt like I was sprinting to stay even remotely close to the pacers, though in fact that kilometre was completed at the same pace I averaged in 2016, which did somewhat put things in perspective.

It was still considerably faster than the pace I thought I was following, though as we got onto wider roads during the second kilometre, the pace did settle considerably. The first 5km contains a few undulations and on the uphills I couldn’t stay with the pacers, though I did start to bring them back every downhill or flat section. I went through 5km in exactly 22 minutes, still with the pacer group but already feeling a bit ragged.

I decided to stick to the same fuelling strategy I had used in the Yorkshire Marathon, so took my first energy gel after 30 minutes. That also coincided with reaching the part of the route where the hardest hills start, and trying to take on a gel on a tough section forced me to slightly ease off the pace. I lost touch with the pacer group, and to be honest that was probably the best thing that could have happened to me. I knew what lay between me and the easier sections of the course, and by following my own pace I had much more confidence about my ability to get through to the finish in somewhat decent shape.

When I got to 8 miles, any thoughts of lifting the pace immediately were put to one side. My pacing on the hills had been pretty sensible, but having gone out pretty hard before we reached those hills, I instead tried to use the next two miles as a period of recovery. Alas, I didn’t really recover. My pace was fairly consistent from 8 to 10 miles, but then my feet started to hurt a lot. In hindsight, my shoe choice was wrong for today. I wore my pair of ASICS Dynablast, which when my form is good feel great, but as soon as my form starts to falter even slightly, they feel horrible. That meant I couldn’t really enjoy the steeper downhill section, and was actually quite pleased when the road started going uphill again.

For at least 20 minutes, I’d been convinced that the next pairs of feet to overtake me would belong to the 1:40 pacers, and when I got to 12 miles, that became a reality. Initially I didn’t try to stick with the pacers, since I’d started in front of them, so assumed that difference would mean I was comfortably outside 1:40. However, with about 500 metres to go a spectator shouted that I was on course to go sub 1:40, and when I checked my watch for the first time, I had just over two minutes to make that a reality. I managed a strong sprint up to the finish by the Cathedral, crossing the line in 1:40:09.

If I wanted to view that time as a glass half empty, I’ve gone about 7 minutes slower on each of my Cov Half appearances now. If I was to look at things glass half full, neither of my previous Cov Half Marathons were two weeks after a full Marathon, and I did manage to go 10 minutes faster than the Kenilworth Half last month.

The time though is somewhat irrelevant. My pacing strategy didn’t pay off as I definitely suffered towards the end, and yet it was still the right strategy. It has been a very long time since I entered a race with a pacing strategy which had any possibility of failing, which means I haven’t found where my limits are. Today was a good day to change that, on a course I know well in really favourable conditions, and I certainly now have a much clearer idea about where my limits lie. My next event is the Coombe 8 (miles), and whilst I’ll need to see what the conditions are like before coming up with any strategies, I should hopefully have a better chance at finding a strategy which is aggressive but slightly more sustainable.

Good Processes = Good Results?

When I resumed training last weekend following a week off after the Yorkshire Marathon, I did so with a mix of thoughts and emotions. I was disappointed that I’d arrived at the start line heavier than for any of my other Marathons and eager to put behind me the injury niggles which had restricted my running during my preparations. Yet at the same time, I was quite encouraged both by how I felt and the time I ran, and was optimistic that with a few small changes, I can get back to somewhere near my best over the next few months.

The smallest but most important changes come in terms of my night time routine. I’d already made good improvements in that area over the past year, but I’ve subsequently bought myself a dehumidifier which I run in my bedroom for at least half an hour before I go to bed. I’m also limiting my phone use in the evenings and switching the TV off at about 9pm. I was already reading before I go to sleep which I’ve continued to do, and the quality of my sleep throughout the past week has been very good.

This is hugely important because every part of a training plan is linked to sleep. Take your diet for example. The biggest challenge I’ve always had is extra snacks – my meals tend to be fairly healthy and well balanced, but there are times when I will be tempted by an extra snack or two during the day, which won’t always be a healthy option. However, this week because I’ve slept well, my energy levels have been good, which means I haven’t been tempted by those extra snacks. Everything I’ve eaten has been exactly what I’d planned the previous evening, which makes it far easier to ensure a balanced diet.

Sleep obviously impacts how well you train too, as it is the biggest factor in terms of how quickly you recover. I’ve felt fresher on some days than others depending on what session I did the previous day, but by spreading out my harder sessions, I’ve been able to ensure that I’ve hit my goal for the session each time, whether that be a steady zone 2 effort, longer threshold efforts or short intervals.

Whilst sleep impacts training, it is also worth remembering that training also impacts sleep. I have started planning my yoga around specifically what I need to get a good night’s sleep, rather than any longer term fitness goals – this could be around stretching out certain muscle groups that I worked hard during my training, or it might be around aiding my digestion if I’ve had a slightly larger meal.

When you think you are following a good process, you want to see that there are some good results from that process. If the results come, it makes it easier to stick to the process as it feels worthwhile, it feels rewarding. If you don’t get those results, then it can be disheartening. Across the week, it was a slightly mixed bag. My training numbers were promising, but my weight seemed to be stubbornly staying where it was. It can however take a few days for your body to respond to changes in training and diet, and over the past couple of days my weight and body fat has started to drop slightly, which is a trend I’d like to see continue.

This morning’s parkrun was a different type of challenge. Having had a rest day yesterday, when I was warming up my legs felt really good. I haven’t done a full effort at parkrun for a couple of months, so the temptation to do one today was huge. However, I have the Cov Half tomorrow, and given I should have an opportunity next Saturday to have a crack at a fast parkrun, I avoided that temptation. Instead, I ran at something slightly slower than 10k pace, with the idea being to get an idea about what type of pace I might feel comfortable at tomorrow without going too deep. I think I executed that plan fairly well, though we’ll see how I feel tomorrow.

The Next Run

A few years back, I set myself the goal of being fit enough to be able to enter pretty much any running event that caught my interest. One of the flaws with this goal is that it isn’t achievable in absolute terms. The range of running events is extremely vast, and many of those events will require a period of specific training before attempting. However, I was thinking more in terms of the mainstream events, anything up to a Marathon, and since setting myself that goal, I’ve occasionally reached the level of fitness I was striving towards.

The first half of 2021 was probably my longest period when I felt like this. I was regularly running 6 days per week, my Sunday long runs were almost always in excess of two hours and I was able to put together a long spell when I wasn’t ill or injured. Whilst the COVID lockdown prevented me from entering any events during that time period, I was able to set myself challenges like seeing how far I could run in five hours. Having still felt fairly good at the end of that challenge, the following month I succeeded in setting new PB’s for weekly and monthly mileage, and then the following month did a solo run along the full length of the Stratford Canal, recording my fastest Marathon time since 2018 in the process.

The problem with a goal like this is that it is impossible to sustain forever. Eventually an injury, illness, loss of motivation or change in lifestyle will cause your fitness levels to drop. Even whilst your fitness is good, these big challenges aren’t something you can do every day. You’ll need a bit of time to build up to them, and will certainly need to allow time to recover from them.

That’s the situation I find myself in at the moment. Since completing the Yorkshire Marathon last weekend, I’ve had all sorts of ideas about running challenges that I could set for myself before the end of this year. Whilst my fitness isn’t where it was in early 2021, none of these challenges are longer than a Marathon, so they should be achievable.

The actual challenge is not getting ahead of myself. One of the challenges I was considering was targeting a specific time during the Coventry Half Marathon next Sunday. But whilst that might add a bit of spice to that event, it would also potentially compromise some of the other goals I have. I’ve never done a Half Marathon so soon after a Marathon before, at least not in an event, and whilst the distance shouldn’t be a problem, if I try to race I feel like it is inviting my hip flexor injury to return at a time when I really want to put that behind me.

At the same time, you can’t enjoy running if you are always worried about getting injured. The risk is always there, and at some stage you just need to put that behind you. The key is to build up sensibly, stretch yourself in ways that are challenging but not reckless. Finding the right balance is not easy, and there is also a balance to be found between focusing on the next run and focusing on the longer-term goal.

Today was my first run after the Yorkshire Marathon, and in the context of this debate I have been having with myself, it was a good one. There haven’t been any specific pains over the past week, and there weren’t any today either. It’s definitely too early to say that the injuries I’ve battled over the past few months are fully behind me, but there certainly hasn’t been any hint of them so far.

However, today’s run was a reminder that whilst I may have resumed running, I am still in the recovery phase after the Marathon. My legs felt very heavy, though no more so than they generally do during the first run after a Marathon. Rushing this phase of training is never advisable, so the VO2 max cycling training session I had planned for tomorrow is postponed in favour of something a little less strenuous, and any goals I do end up setting myself for the Cov Half need to be modest ones. If things go well then hopefully I won’t be far off being in a position to take on my next challenge, but for now it is very much one run at a time.

Can Cycling Form The Basis Of Marathon Training?

If I exclude the Marathons I ran during the 12 in 12 Challenge, I ran the least in the preparation for my most recent Marathon. Injuries hit my preparations for both Windermere Marathons, but those injuries came at points in my training plan where I’d already built up my base fitness to a good level. Injuries also delayed the start of my training for last year’s Yorkshire Marathon, though once I started training everything went pretty smoothly on that occasion. This time I was still having to manage my hip flexor even into the final week of training, and the differences can be seen in my training numbers. In September 2022 I ran 192km, but this September I could only manage 121km. Yet this year I went 3 minutes faster, and whilst motivation, fuelling and cooler temperatures all contributed to that, it nevertheless got me wondering whether I need to run as much as I have in the past to prepare for a Marathon.

Those running numbers are to an extent misleading. I say to an extent because I’m not sure my hip flexor would have allowed me to do much more than 121km this year, but it only tells a partial story of my training this year. Last year, I didn’t do much cross-training in September, with just a couple of swims logged during the month. This year I did 159km of cycling in September, meaning that my time spent training was probably broadly similar. Those rides were very much planned around my running though, and I feel like there is plenty of scope to combine running and cycling more effectively.

A training week can be broken down into five main components. The first is rest, and I’ve found that I always need to have at least one complete rest day each week. I won’t always need a recovery day, but they will feature regularly throughout a training block. There are base sessions, which will be relatively easy but also relatively short sessions (short enough that I don’t need to think about fuelling during the sessions). There will be high intensity sessions, and finally there will be longer sessions which do require fuelling during the session.

Two of these are very easy to plan. Recovery sessions on the bike are so much nicer than running recovery sessions. You can ease into them more gradually, and you don’t have to deal with the forces that pounding the ground creates through your ankles, knees and hips. So if I need a recovery session, it will be on the bike.

The longer sessions will be runs. Partly this is a result of personal preference. A long bike ride outdoors in the Summer can be a very enjoyable experience, but as much as I like Zwift, doing long sessions really doesn’t hold the same appeal. I’d rather be running, it is more familiar to me in the Winter and getting things like my clothing choices correct is therefore easier. Obviously it also replicates the end goal more closely too, meaning that I can practice fuelling and perhaps things like hills or other obstacles depending on what is in store for the Marathon I have signed up for.

Base sessions are fairly straightforward on the bike or as a run. On the bike you can probably be a bit more methodical by really targeting either a specific power or heart rate you want to stick to, but I’ve become much better in recent years of not going too hard during my base runs. They therefore lend themselves to being the most flexible part of my training plan – if I’ve planned a run but the weather takes a turn for the worse, I can jump on the bike instead, and likewise if it seems too nice a day to train inside, I can switch a planned ride to a run just as easily.

The session which is causing the biggest dilemma is the higher intensity sessions. The benefits of the bike are again the fact that I can be a bit more methodical, and the risk of a muscle injury also seems lower – I’m not sure whether scientific research supports that, but I’ve never picked up a muscle injury cycling. I have occasionally picked up muscle injuries doing interval sessions, albeit mostly when I have been working back from other injuries.

However, the benefits of a running interval session are not only in terms of aerobic and anaerobic fitness. Interval sessions are a great place to improve your running form and technique, and if you can round tight corners safely at 5k pace, you know you don’t need to worry about them when you run at Marathon pace. However, unless your Marathon is on the track (and I have no desire to do one of those), this does mean this type of practice will be best done on the roads, where there will be corners, changes in gradient and different surfaces to negotiate. All of which makes taking a more methodical approach more difficult than on a track and much more difficult than on a bike.

The only real solution to this will be to experiment and see what works for me. It might be that I save the highest intensity efforts for the bike, where I’m in a controlled environment, and then do slightly longer efforts as a run where I’m not quite at a maximum effort. The good news is that I have a bit of time between now and the start of my next training block where I can test a few different options and see what works for me.

The Yorkshire Marathon 2023

When I get towards the end of today’s blog, it would be easy to think I had everything carefully planned for today’s Marathon. In truth, that really wasn’t the case, at least not in terms of my pacing strategy. I hadn’t done enough long runs or running in general to have a clear idea about the type of pace I could sustain over 26.2 miles, so following my watch was out of the question. Instead, I decided to run to feel, trying to sustain an effort which I felt I could at the very least sustain well into the second half of the Marathon, and ideally all the way through to the end.

That though is still a tricky thing to determine. An easy effort is probably still too hard, ideally you want to cruise at a really easy effort, at least for the first hour. With hindsight I could have probably checked my heart rate at a few points to monitor this, but the truth was everything felt good until it didn’t.

I always seem to need to use the bathroom once in a Marathon, so I don’t really concern myself if that is very early in the run. I was considering using the bathroom from around 8km into the run, but whenever I arrived at a portaloo, they were always occupied. It got to the stage where I decided I had to stop at the next portaloo, which was at about 11 miles.

At the same time, I had been considering when to remove my arm warmers. It was just 3C at the start, so were very much necessary. However, not only was I warming up, the temperature was warming up too. On a beautiful sunny day, it reached double figures before the end, so I knew I would need to remove them at some point. The obvious opportunity became when I stopped to use the bathroom.

The problem was I left both a little longer than ideally I should have, and was also going at a pace I thought I couldn’t sustain. I had started behind the 3:45 pacers, but had overtaken them and one the only early occasion when I looked at my watch, I was going faster than 3:30 pace. My third gel wasn’t easy to get down, and I started wondering whether my lack of running was going to catch up with me.

Then things got worse. I tried to tick my arm warmers into my shorts, but realised I couldn’t do that on the run, so soon stopped again to sort that. I was probably running only for another minute before one of them fell out, though it would be another 15 seconds before I realised, meaning I had to turn and go back to collect it. By this stage I was behind the 3:45 pacers again, though once my arm warmers were secured I was able to settle into a steady rhythm.

Before the run, I had worried whether the pacers would derail my attempt to run to feel, being a constant reminder of whichever pace I was running. However, the fact that they aim for a fairly even pace meant they actually proved a huge help for me today. I had caught the 3:45 pacers by halfway, but rather than passing, I settled into the group behind and tried not to go too deep over what I knew was one of the trickier parts of the course. Eventually the gap started to grow and grow, and by 20 miles I could no longer see them.

Normally what happens at that point is that my pace slows, normally not dramatically and enough to keep my comfortably below 4 hours. And indeed, that’s what happened today. From regularly completing kilometres inside 5:30, I was now only just inside 6 minutes. But then things changed.

My former Cricket captain for Goodricke College at York had messaged me during the week to say he was running, and went on to let me know the pace he was hoping to run. If he achieved that, he wouldn’t be far away from me, and had only been a couple of minutes behind at both of the switchbacks. If his stamina was holding out better than mine, I knew I could see him at any moment, and did exactly that with about 4 miles to go.

I viewed my role as a satellite rider in the Tour De France. I had invested some energy to get up the road early in the stage, and now had the opportunity to use my remaining energy to help him get to the finish in the best time possible. I upped my pace to match his, though it felt quite a big increase in effort so I wasn’t sure whether I would be able to sustain it through to the finish.

Yet somehow I found the energy to do just that. It was strange because I was still counting down the miles, doing mental arithmetic to work out what the final time would be, all of the usual things I do towards the end of a Marathon, but it didn’t feel like that. We were able to share a conversation for much of the final 4 miles, and spurr each other on. At times I would be struggling, at other times (particularly as I approached my old house), I started feeling good, and though the final hill was still a brute, I worked hard to get up there as fast as I could.

Sadly that sapped any energy I had left for a sprint, but still came home in a time of 3:47:04, an improving of more than 3 minutes compared to last year and my second fastest Marathon since COVID. As always, I’ll be back next year, albeit I do need to work out which event I’m going to do.

How Valuable Is Marathon Experience?

I haven’t found myself too often one week out from a Marathon with so little training mileage in my legs. I haven’t clocked up a single 30km or 3 hour run since the Connemarathon in April, and only have a handful of two hour runs over the past couple of months too. Whilst I have managed to run some of my faster Marathons off the back of a similar number of long runs, those were at a time when I was getting a good mixture of mileage and intensity from my runs across the rest of the week. By contrast in this training block there have been weeks when my long run has been my only run of the week, and generally there hasn’t been much intensity as whenever I’ve tried to increase the intensity, my hip flexor has complained over the following days. I’ve been able to supplement my running with quite a lot of cycling, but whilst that has prevented my cardiovascular fitness from dropping too much, adjusting my diet around a different type of training programme has proved tricky and I’ll start the Yorkshire Marathon at the heaviest weight I’ve ever been for a Marathon.

At times I’ve felt very unprepared, yet strangely calm about the prospect of running a Marathon next Sunday. Firstly, I have no ambitions beyond completing the distance and enjoying the event as much as I can. Secondly, I might be under prepared in terms of training runs and overall fitness, but I’m definitely not unprepared in terms of the challenge which lies in store. I have the experience of 25 Marathons to draw upon, some of which I came into with even worse preparations than I do this time, and I found a way to get myself to the finish. I might have to DNF at some stage in the future, but there is no reason to think that will be next week at this stage.

More often than not, if the final hour or so of a Marathon has become a major struggle for me, it has been because I haven’t gotten my fuelling strategy correct on the day. On a couple of occasions that was due to naivety on my behalf, as I didn’t appreciate just how much fuel you need to take on during the run to replenish what you’ve used up. On other occasions, I started with a strategy which should have been sufficient, but couldn’t take on as much fuel as I wanted as my stomach was indicating it couldn’t take anything more.

Fuelling has therefore been a main focus of all of my longer runs, and that aspect seems quite successful. I have practiced taking on gels more frequently, every 30 minutes rather than every 45 minutes, and have also experimented with a few different types of gels. I will primarily be using SiS Beta Fuel gels which seem to be working well for me. I’ve managed to take on four gels during a couple of my runs without any issues, and whilst I’ll need to increase that to 6-7 for the Marathon, I’m optimistic that provided it isn’t too hot, I can handle that number of gels.

Strangely my biggest concern is actually the pacers at the Yorkshire Marathon. On my training runs, I’ve been able to settle into my own rhythm by not looking at my watch and focusing only on my perceived effort. Whilst I’ll generally have a rough idea of how fast I’m going due to the 30 minute reminders to take a gel, the urge to adjust my pace is not as significant as it can be when I look at my kilometre splits on my watch (which I still record but don’t look at). However, I’ll know which pacers I’m between during the Marathon, so will have a pretty clear idea about the pace I’m running at all times. Hopefully that doesn’t cause me to be too ambitious with my pacing, though that is a mistake I’ve made before so it is definitely something I’ll be aware of.

There is a balance to be found when it comes to Marathons between respecting the distance whilst not being overawed by the challenge. If you get through a good training block, the challenge shouldn’t seem as great, but there’s nothing like the reassurance that comes from having completed the distance before. Ultimately though, the value of experience is something I’m going to find out first hand next Sunday.

Your Next Podcast Star?

Earlier this week it was suggested to me that I co-host a podcast. I’m fairly sure the suggestion was a joke, and it certainly didn’t come with any ideas about what the podcast would be about, and for those reasons, I declared myself out. Yet the suggestion of doing a podcast was one which intrigued me, and if a theme for a podcast excited me enough, it is definitely something I would pursue further.

I should point out that I am fully aware if I wanted to start a podcast, I should have done so about 10 years ago if I wanted it to be a success. Today almost every niche has been filled, every celebrity and established IP has entered the market and the odds of a new podcast gaining even a modest following are extremely slim. So given all of that, what’s with the title of this post? Is it nothing more than click bait?

Well, actually no. Okay, maybe a little as ‘star’ implies a level of public success which I know is unrealistic. Yet public success is not the only form of success, and starting a podcast could still deliver other forms of success. To create regular podcasts, you would need to plan and potentially research your ideas to turn them into content, and then be able to discuss a particular topic in an engaging way. These are skills which would be directly relevant in my current role, for example when designing and delivering a new training session or presentation, and are skills which are extremely useful in almost any role. Skills like editing audio are more specialist and probably unlikely to be useful in my future career, but learning something from scratch is something that doesn’t come around too often as an adult, so would still be an interesting and therefore worthwhile experience, and therefore also a success.

Even if you already have relatively developed skills in these areas, this type of project can still be extremely rewarding even without being a public success. That was certainly the case when I wrote my novel. I always knew that the chances of appearing in a best seller list, or even reaching anybody beyond my friends, family and colleagues were unlikely. Yet it would be a success if I managed to maximise my potential and make it the best novel I was capable of writing. All things considered, I’d say I achieved that, and that gives me more satisfaction than any number of sales would do.

As a runner and cyclist, I know that there are few things that promote perseverance and determination more than the potential reward of a personal best. How close those PB’s are to World Records is irrelevant, because the reward comes from pushing beyond what you have previously been capable of. Those PB’s aren’t a single event either, but a culmination of all of the previous PB’s which have been improved upon to reach your personal apex.

The problem with physical PB’s is that time will eventually catch up to you. Eventually you won’t be able to run faster than you currently can, regardless of how hard or smart you train, and whilst I theoretically haven’t reached that point just yet, I’m glad that I’ve discovered that the adventure element to running and cycling can also be rewarding in its own way, and hopefully should be enough motivation to keep physically active even once I start slowing down.

The desire to challenge my physical limits might be diminishing, but the knowledge of the rewards that can deliver remains. The challenge which can deliver that reward will most likely look different. Maybe it looks like a podcast, maybe it doesn’t. Whatever form it takes and whenever it arrives, I’m ready.