confused.com

In a wild rush of enthusiasm following the recent half-marathon, I entered a 10 mile race in Ballater, which I have suddenly realised is, in fact, on Sunday. I’d been thinking, ha, 10 miles, that’s nothing, I’ve just run 13, but 10 miles now seems, y’know, still quite far, given that I haven’t actually run that distance very often, and not in a race apart from the half marathon, and it’s not one of those enormous races where people are still straggling in at tea time but quite a small one with proper runners in it, so I may in fact be last. Oh well. Someone has to be. (I’ve never yet come last in a race, although I came close with the snowy-and-icy beach 10k just before Christmas when I came 79th out of 83, but I comforted myself with the idea that the awful weather would have put off most of my fellow plodders and only mostly proper runners would have turned up.)

I do need to ramp up the mileage, though, because I have the marathon in, er, 10 weeks, and my Runners World training programme calls for a 9 mile run this week and 10 miles next (after which it all starts getting a bit scary) so I thought I would do the 10 miler this week instead. Other thing is, we’ll be on hols (in a caravan in the Lake District) for two weeks from Monday, so I don’t know how the running is going to go, though I’m hoping for lots of lovely scenic probably hilly runs.

I’ve been keeping up with the programme not too badly so far and managed a 5 mile tempo run in 45 minutes on Saturday (woo!) with, get this, an average pace of 8:59. And every mile except the first was sub-9 minutes. So I was pretty pleased with that, even though I felt knackered at the end, and indeed most of the way come to that. Then did 7.61 miles yesterday in boiling heat (well, what passes for boiling heat up here in the frozen northern wastelands where anything above freezing point has us casting off our cardigans and heading for the beach). Not only was it hot, but some of it was uphill, and I did do a bit of walking.

This whole long run pace business, not to mention the taking or not taking of walk breaks, has me a bit conflicted. The RW schedule (after I put in my best race time) has me doing long runs at near on 12 minute miles (McMillan Running calculator suggests between 11 and 12 minute miles), and I know the theory about long runs being slower, but I really struggle to run that slowly. Except when going uphill. My natural pace seems to be around 10 min/miles and even when I try to go slower I invariably speed up. Plus, even though nearly every advice source says Do Long Runs Slowly, I can’t really get my head around the idea that if I’m doing them all at 11:30 pace, or whatever, I can suddenly magically run faster in a long race. As it is, my "race pace" (for the half marathon anyway) and long run pace are pretty much the same rate of ploddiness. Although I did think afterwards I could have done the half a bit faster.

The other thing is walking breaks. I know it’s a can-of-worms topic among runners. The experts seem to have widely diverging views on this, from "Never walk, you’ll only regret it" (Graeme Hilditch in his marathon training guide) to advising regular, planned walk breaks throughout. I think the chances of me running an entire marathon without any walking are slim, but I don’t know whether it’s better to keep running for as long as I can and only take short walk breaks when I feel I absolutely have to, or schedule in walk breaks from the start whether I need them or not. Current approach is more along the lines of the former, running as much as I can but sometimes (not every long run, but some of them) walking a little bit on some uphill bits or when I feel especially knackered, and then starting running again when I feel able or, more likely, when I see someone coming towards me and am embarrassed to be seen walking. But maybe, if I ran slower, I wouldn’t have to do this? Hmmm. Or maybe I just need to toughen up and be less of a wimp.

20 July

Distance: 7.61 miles
Time: 01:15:48
Splits: 9:27 9:44 9:55 10:08 10:23 11:14 9:25 5:32
Average pace: 9:58

17 July

Distance: 5.01 miles
Time: 45:01
Splits: 9:10 8:54 8:58 8:59 8:52
Average pace: 8:59