When I put together my January training plan the other week, I knew that this weekend was going to be difficult. I originally planned to try and get a quick run in this morning. However, that didn’t come to pass.
I had a wonderful evening last night going out for dinner in Solihull with Valerie, a good friend of the family and someone Jude has known since childhood (being Lorna’s mother). I was staying at the Holiday Inn nearby, and so it was a good opportunity to catch up.
I was back at the hotel at a reasonable time and I tried to get to sleep early. This didn’t quite work because my mind was still racing with all the information from the first day’s training. However, my alarm went off this morning at 4:30 to give me time to finish a chunk of work that I needed to do for tomorrow – which I’d meant to complete on Friday and ran out of time.
I was done by 7, and there was enough time for a shower, check-out and a quick breakfast roll before getting to the training session at 8:15.
It was another very interesting day. I found that people were talking a lot quieter, or the air conditioning was a lot louder. Either way, it meant that the bionic ears were not quite as useful as yesterday; but it was better than not having them in at all.
One thing that I’ve noticed with the hearing aids is that if I don’t talk for a long time – for example, if I’m listening to a long training session – then the sound of my own voice gets very weird, loud and robotic. This was very disconcerting when I came to ask a question. It’s fair to say that I was taken aback when I first started to speak.
The whole day was fascinating and the effect on some people was amazing. I was happy to come away with a bunch of strategies for working which I didn’t have at the start of the weekend. Some of which I’ve used already since getting home.
I got back home after 8pm still not having had the run that I’d hoped to do before breakfast. So in my loving caring fatherly way, having not seen the children or Jude for two days, I said hello to everyone, watched a youtube video that Joel had found and then headed straight out to try and squeeze a run in.
I also had a Skype appointment booked for 9pm to try and get another project moving forward and so I only had about 45 minutes max to get ready and out, so my plan was to run down the main road for 15 minutes, turn around and head back for a 30-ish minute run.
As it turned out, I was feeling a lot more comfortable in my run that I have done for ages. At 15 minutes I was nearing 1.5 miles and so I decided to go that little bit extra and go for 5k. When I got to two miles I was still averaging less than 11 minutes per mile, which for me is excellent and is better than I was doing last year.
It’s very slightly uphill on the way back and my pace dropped a little, but I still got in the three miles in 33:36 minutes and the 5.1km in 35:16, which is amongst my best times. I think that there was a problem with runkeeper on my old Android phone last year, because some days I was getting times of 10:30 per mile and there’s no way that I can imagine how or why I was getting them. When I reviewed the GPS tracks they had me zig zagging around the roads and I think that all those miscalculated positions made the times look better than they were. It’s definitely the fastest that I’ve run in the past six months.
The main point is that it felt quite easy. I think that I could have gone a bit quicker both ways, but I was more interested in just getting the run in rather than doing anything quick. Given the day that I’d had I just wanted to finish the run.
Because then I had a Skype call while scoffing some re-heated chinese from yesterday evening’s mega sleep-over, which I unfortunately missed. Followed by putting together a powerpoint presentation and of course some blogging. So 20 hours in on the day, I’m going to sign off this blog. As far as I can see, there aren’t any more long long days where it will be difficult to fit in a run or some exercise. Hopefully this means that we’re on the last stretch to the end of the month.
Fingers crossed nothing gets hurt in the last 11 days.
Oh, and here’s the “Beautiful Day” video. We heard a lot of this at the training this weekend. It might be a cliché to use it at training, but I still like the song a lot, so I’m not complaining.