Race week!

Holy crap it’s here 12 weeks of training completed, some 526 miles to date…I spare you all the numbers but this coming Sunday I will be on the go line ready to well…go! I have another couple of “training” runs to complete the plan along with a recovery run and I am done! I fully expect there to be an ever increasing colony of butterflies as the week progresses. I think that this is actually the first time I have a really specific goal that I have trained towards specifically, previously they have been filed under “just finish” or “better than the last time” so it’s going to be an interesting race.

Looking back on the training the ingredients are all there,  I consistently followed the training plan, cutting it short to coincide with race day was the only really major deviation, of the three specific runs; intervals, short tempo and long tempo. Other minor changes were some of the paces to simulate race day and actually having a race to dial in my final month of training.

The progress has been measurable though, a new 5k PR (-31 seconds) and a new (u/o) 10m PR (-3:15 minutes). The race simulations proved very useful, the first was not so good and reminded me that I needed to check the weather and adjust things to allow for the change in temperature, the second, actually run on 10m of the course (as best I could tell) proved very successful and a healthy dose of race day nerves should allow me to dial it down to the target pace.

So all that remains is packet pick up on Friday and to set the alarm for Sunday morning!