Sitting down to write this blog is almost impossible, actually opening my laptop takes such an effort and when I finally sit down at night the only things I have any energy for is the TV remote and the odd grunt for tea to my husband.
The kids are now 1 and 2 and keeping me busy from dawn to dusk. Both my kids and I have two gears in life; 5 and reverse. From about 5.30am its go, go, go as breakfast, milk and lets play garages are shouted in no particular order till 7pm when kids bedroom doors are shut and I handover parental duties to husband, sprinting out of the door to do my run session. The effort this sometimes takes is much harder than the actual run. I am absolutely shattered from a day of kids, cooking, cleaning, tantrums, the endless patience and normally have between 6-10 miles to cover before I can feed myself and collapse on the sofa. However its sitting on our door step, putting on my trainers, feeling weak when I remind myself- this is frigging hard, you don’t want to go, you want to lie on the floor and rock back and forth; this is what makes you strong, this is how you are going to achieve your dreams, get your fat butt out the door and start moving! I always, always feel better and am positive I am a 100% better mum for being fit and healthy.
Following some really good advice on my training I am now much more focused on making every session and every step count. I think I ran myself into a bit of a hole, from January to April I was running high mileage, with big weekend runs plus still feeding the baby. Everything was really aching all the time and I was running with more and more niggles. I had some good results at local races, but felt like I couldn’t maintain this without ending up injured and mentally burnt out. I was also rocking up to races not really excited about running a long way as it was all I doing!
So I have now binned these long long runs for a while and am now spending the next few months on quality runs. I love a good smashfest/darvada breathing session (one nice volunteer at an aid station this weekend commented on how she had my drink ready as she could hear me coming!) and am enjoying 2-3 weekly track, tempo or hill runs. I am understanding this aren’t necessarily going to make me that much faster, but they are going to make me stronger. I know I can run a really decent 30 miles its the next part that I am now concentrating on and funnily enough by running shorter and harder I know the strength both mentally and physically will come.
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| The thighs in action! |
I had a brilliant and eye opening time last week attending a 3hrs endurance session with Robbie Britton (http://robbiebritton.co.uk/) and Rebecca Cox ( http://lifeafterdeskpt.com/) over Box Hill. The session not only fuelled my passion for the sport, but also reinforced my new found understanding that you need to be strong to run ultras (Coxy forced us to look at Robbie’s thighs to determine this fact). We competed a number of eye watering squats,burpees and up hill sprints to rip our muscles up nicely before running up and down a hill for half an hour…I love a good burpee myself and loved meeting Coxy who is passionate about women and the role sport plays in their lives. We also talked about how important it was to maintain functional strength in muscles and how you can gain this through running without adding another set of strength and conditioning sessions to an already max out training plan. We had a nice 8 mile jog after the hills reps where I got to chat to Robbie about how he stays positive during his epic long runs, a lot of it seemed to do with talking his opponents into submission (not much of that this week as he smashed the SDW 100 from start to finish).
What a pair of role models, its great to meet people so passionate about their sport and so willing to give up their time to share. Robbie is all about making ultras easy and he talked about how much hill running he does in everyday training and how….well I wont tell you anymore of his secrets, you’ll have to attend the next session and find out for yourself!
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| Ill take the lighter one! |
I am looking forward to another couple of weeks of solid training before I have a little taper to take on Bewl 15, there is prize money for breaking the course record and I really need a new running t shirt. Then its another few weeks before Salisbury 50km, Sussex Ultra and Beachy Head marathon in October to hopefully add to my trio of wins over bloody hilly marathons.
It feels so good to be into the swing of life once more and with the prospect of a small part time job and kids getting slightly easier life is happy and running whatever the speed is great.