A serious lack of blogging has been going on!!!! Life has been a bit of a rollercoaster this year but having done three races this year (that's a huge improvement on recent years) I thought I best write some race reports at least!
So, just to bring events up to current day before the race reports, the start of the year was hit by illness which hampered training, then my asthma flared up as a result quite badly leading to a painful chesty cough that went on a long time. I was training for the Preseli Beast Bach (in May) by this point so when my chest felt a bit easier off I went for a hilly run only to jar my rib muscles on a steep descent when I was coughing badly. Pulled rib muscles are painful buggers as just turning over in bed caused sheering pain and running was out as was swimming as I couldn't stretch. Then I had a minor operation on my finger so again I couldn't swim so all in all I decided to drop out of the triathlons/duathlons I had planned and just focus on my running races as my training had been so sporadic at the start of the year.
When I finally got back to run training properly things were going well and I was chuffed that all my miles at zone 2 heart rate had worked a treat as my time per mile was dropping steadily without any more effort. I started to add in a few tempo runs and was pleased that I could sustain a faster pace, although I wasn't training to any set pace, just going on feel.
The races I had lined up were the Preseli Beast Bach, 11 miles covering 2000ft of climbing in the Pembrokeshire Mountain range - The Preseli's. This was a race carried over from last year when I was injured; then the Beast of Bryn (15 miles of hilly trails), again carried over from last year, the Swansea Half Marathon, and then the Scott Snowdonia Trail Marathon. Unfortunately, the Beast Of Bryn got cancelled due to events with Tata Steel (the sponsors) but I still had three good races to focus on with the last one, the Snowdonia Marathon being my first marathon and the most important one in my book. If i could achieve that after the years of running injuries I'd had then I would be well happy...
Training wise I was still using the turbo, but wasn't going out on the bike on weekends as I was focusing on long runs, and getting my gym work in. As it was as well, the early part of the year life took over a bit too so having just running to really focus on was helpful for balancing up work/training/life. My early morning training routine was very much hit and miss, but I was at least getting the training done and feeling good when doing it. It's not been plain sailing though as I've had some stuff going on that affected my appetite so I was conscious I was running on empty a lot of the time for a period but the positive was that the weight I had put on over the past couple of years from being injured and liking junk food too much fell off me so I was the lightest I'd ever been and feeling great for it!!! Now it's about keeping it off!!!!!!!! My shoulder injury still isn't sorted, I had a MRI that looked right at the shoulder joint but they found nothing there and then discharged me, even though I still had the issue. Not sure what I'm going to do about it but for now I'm just watching the pain when I do manage to go swimming and hopefully from now on I can get a couple of swims in a week and then maybe return to club swims from end of September when the focus will return to basics rather than the race prep stuff they will be doing now.
In life stuff, I passed my MSc in Sport Psychology with a merit and graduated this month out of The Millennium Centre which was pretty stunning, (if not long and tedious as I was 3rd from last to go up!!). I've also started a new job which is setting up a service for people with personality disorders that I am leading from scratch, so that's been a challenge as no-one wants to be helpful and instead people tend to ignore your requests!!!!!!
Anyways...race reports to follow...
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