Training update 2

It's now just 4½ months until the Bungay Black Dog! With this in mind I have been licking my training schedule into shape over the last little while. That means it's now more interesting, and hopefully more effective, than the "60 minutes steady run round the park" I was doing 2 or 3 times a week. According to the experts there are several important kinds of training, incorporating different speeds and distances; these in combination are meant to build up fitness and endurance, for example by making the muscles more effective in their use of the oxygen in your blood. I find the body's capacity to adapt to exercise (in other words to get fitter) really amazing. I never expect it to work!

At the moment I'm still only managing three runs a week, but they are quite varied. Perhaps the most important one (definitely for my psychological readiness if nothing else) is the "long run", which I'm increasing by 10 minutes (about a mile) a week. I should be at a half-marathon distance next week or the week after, which works out right for this length of time before the marathons. Then I have an "interval run", a very new and challenging discipline for me, which involves (after a warm-up period of gentle running) alternating fast running with jogging to recover. My most recent interval run included eight repetitions of 90 seconds fast and 90 seconds jog. Let's say it was good to stop! The final run is a bit of a hybrid at the moment, as I've tried to compress into it a steady run and a tempo run. Tempo, or threshold, running is even harder for me than intervals - it means running at the limit of your aerobic capacity so that you can keep going, but only just! Finding this whole idea rather scary, I've started by trying to put a bit of this type of running into the middle of an hour's steady run. I'm not sure I'm running fast enough for the "threshold" section of it, but to run any faster than my standard speed for longer than a minute or two is already an achievement!

The great thing is that I can see the evidence that these efforts are working. If I drop back down to something that seemed hard a few weeks ago, it's now noticeably easier. The tiredness of my legs after a run doesn't last as long. I can make a bit more of an effort up a hill or against the wind without gasping for breath. Maybe I will be able to run a marathon! Maybe even two!

Looking back over my posts I see I haven't said a lot so far about WPF Therapy. It's next on the list, so keep an eye out!