March - To re-start or to stall?

Hello hello!

Well after last months awful training programme, I started feeling the heat a little... if only due to the growing hypocrisy of trying to encourage my friends to train, whilst I sat with my feet up :)

I decided I had to raise the bar with my training as time was ticking and I'd done enough 6k runs to build my general fitness up, so I knocked the distance up to 10k and decided that this was the distance I needed to focus on. However, as I was just starting at this distance, the focus would be on the number of runs rather than the time at this point.

10km
05/03 - 56:37
12/03 - 51:52
25/03 - 49:56
31/03 - 57:50

The last run was a particularly bad one sadly. This was due to having the day off work, and slobbing about and not making any food. This meant when I started on my run in the late afternoon I was running off my pre-run booster of a few mini-eggs and a banana. This worked very well for two thirds of the course, but after I'd burnt them off, there was no food at all left inside me to burn, which led to a chronic collapse in performance for the last third. The legs really did refuse to obey, and they felt more tired then what they had during the Great North Run. I think this showed me just how important diet is for these longer runs.

Anyway, looking back at the month, I felt I'd managed to recover it a bit... but could have done more runs. If I'm going to get a better time than last year, I'd need to step things up as there wasn't enough runs this month to get much of an improvement... but it was a start at least and would stand me in good stead for Aprils. Next month would be make or break time I felt, and as I entered May, I felt the mental resolve was finally there again to get out and hit the streets.

Andy