This Saturday was my Dad’s birthday and, being the manically active family we are, we decided to celebrate by going on a 30 mile bike ride. Mum & Dad on tandem; me and Gem on road bikes. The weather was gorgeous; sunny as you like with the light changing to a soft golden as we neared the end of the ride. We meandered our way from Haxby to Easingwold and then back via Aln and Tollerton, losing our way slightly due to a diversion but obviously having lots of banter about this.
The next day, I went on one of my longer training runs: 15K. With one of the those groovy waterbottles-with-a-hole-in in hand, I secured my extremely fashionable bum bag, containing my phone (to measure distance) and one of the most important long-distance training fuels you will come across: jelly babies. When your strength is sapping, pop a jelly baby in your mouth and the rush of sugar will give you the energy kick you need – trust me. (Just make sure you have a gulp of water after so they don’t glue your tongue to the roof of your mouth). I probably ate a jelly baby every 5K and they fuelled me round the whole 15K in 1:22:49. And, surprisingly, it wasn’t actually too bad. There was a fair amount of cloud cover and it wasn’t too hot – so not bad conditions to run in. I am optimistic for a good time in September – I am aiming to run the half marathon under two hours.
After a couple of rest days, I decided to smash out a 5K as fast as I could – according to Dad, this is called tempo training (where you push yourself aerobically to your limits) and is something I’m doing as part of my half marathon training. And, apart from being pretty aerobically hard (which, really, was the point) it was rather successful. After having slogged round 15K, the fact that I only had to run 5K was more than enough to keep me running at the pace I was going. And I actually got a PB: 00:23:22 which I am really pleased with (‘smashed itttt’ as my friend Hannah would say). And to top it off, our team came 2nd in the pub quiz that night, which we were very happy with as we got a free bottle of wine out of it (plus whoever came first was miles ahead). So a good week, both for training and fun!
Thoughts, walks, forks. 