That sub 22 5k

At a recent race my mile speeds were disappointing

7.05.2014

A few years ago my Garmin showed me a shade under 21mins when I completed a 5k Assembly League race. I learned later that this was a short course, and did not quite come up to the 5000m mark, but even so, this was a fast time. I was about 48 years old. Now I am 51, and agree with generous hearted friends when they say that clocking anything under 25mins is an achievement most women of my age would be happy with. However I am committed to improving my times over shorter distance, while all the time having my eye on that 2015 VLM prize.
The next Assembly League is on 3 June, followed by a gig as team leader or Women's Running magazine team at the Battersea Park Race for Life. I'm hoping my Erik sessions and club sessions will help fire up my core and legs to get everything moving faster.
Today though, I set my Garmin to measure my 5k run after a 10 minute warm up and could not get the thing to read much under 8m miles. Given that a usually slower Parkrun buddy recorded her mile (on the (50th?) anniversary of Sir Roger Bannister's sub four-minute mile) yesterday as 7.10m, this is a poor showing indeed. Perhaps I am still fatigued from the Conti Lightning Run. Perhaps the distrubed sleep from hormonal fluctuations and snoring bed partner is more detrimental than I thought. Perhaps my abandoned noshing of Easter chocolate and biscuits is slowing me down. Whatever it is, I have to address the problem and start burning up the intervals, from 200m upward.

Bash a tyre, glutes on fire

Erik Lee shows how it's done

06.05.2014

Blearily, I toiled up Vicar's Hill on my bike for my Tuesday training session with Team Shape-U. One of our missions today was to pound a half tyre with a heavy mallet. Fearful of staving in my face with its metal head, I was a little pathetic, to say the least. My fellow trainees, Hyacinth and Joan, really gave that tyre some welly. In fact they led the way in every discipline today. Leg lifts, halo lunges, ball slams, side-to-sides, balance...they ripped it up, while I trailed feebly in their wake.
I'm still weary from my efforts at the Conti Lightning Run  in Derbyshire on Sunday. I sent much of the day exchanging photos, obtaining quotes and generally interacting with my team of powerful women - the Women's Running Team. As Eerik said, I did a lot of cardio over the weekend and now need to look to my strength training and nutrition. Sounds good.
For more on our Conti Lightning Run experience, go to fellow Women's Running Team Captain Laraine Wyn Jones's blog: sixhourmarathonrunnerblogspot.co.uk

Bank Holiday Glumday

05.05.2014

After the endorphin rushes, the festival atmosphere, the lack of sleep, excess of exercise, great outdoorsiness of the past 24 hours, there's a creeping sense of heaviness taking over. The day was spent in the impressive rus in urbs Hackney garden to celebrate the birthday of an old friend. Multiple glasses of bubbly, excessive amounts of pasta, walnutty salad and chocolate cheesecake , lots of people to catch up with....but the fatigue kicked in as the feasting went on and I found myself sitting wanly over a cup of tea trying to concentrate on what people were saying to me. It's no surprise that 18 miles of cross country running, following a freezing night in a sleeping bag with a broken zip in a tiny tent, topped off by a long and arduous train journey home that took me until 1am, would render this exhausted body rather susceptible to unlimited alcohol and rich food. My senses are dulled, my brain fuddled, my stomach bloated. It's time to reboot. This has been a rest day and no mistake. Obviously (to quote new snooker champion Mark Selby). Fillin' up. 

A festival of running

4 May 2013

Look at us five. We are the Women's Running magazine team that podiumed in third place earlier today. A job well done and, speaking personally, a job that has sparked  a newfound love of 10k crocountry run. My laps were 53.52, 51.25 and 52.33 mins respectively. And I was proud.

Conti Lightning Run

03.05.2014
In half an hour or so I shall be setting off, tent on back, to catch a train to Burton-on-Trent, where I shall be picked up by a woman called Helen, one of the Women's Running Magazine team taking part in the abovementioned run in Catton Park, Staffordshire. There are five of us, led by me, as magazine contributor and a fellow writer, Laraine Wyn Jones.
Our challenge will be to run as many 10k laps of a cross country course in a 12 hour period from 6am tomorrow. I want to get 14 under our collective belt but fear this is an impossible dream, because three in the team do not reckon to run the distance in under an hour. My personal challenge is to get three done in under 50 mins each. That is hilarious, since my 10k pb is a rather arduous 47mins. Dream on in your tent, daft old bird.

Balls to it

A recovery walk to Ladywell Fields 

2.05.2014

My Swiss ball, which I am using as a seat while I type this, is a bit deflated, much as I felt after last night's race. Every morning I use the ball to perform a less than athletic pike move, then upend my arse into a position called the jacknife. I must look completely inane, especial when my pyjama top flops down over my upside down head and reveals my breasts to my startled husband. I count 15 jacknifes after a bit of foam roller work on the tired legs. The jacknifes are too easy though, because my ball needs pumping up and I've mislaid the pump.
Most of my home-based exercises, on the yoga mat, with dumbbells, tricep dips on the edge of the bath are done hurriedly and inexpertly, but religiously. Every morning. I am aware that this activity irritates my husband, who thinks that 51 year old women should confine themselves to long walks and the odd pilates class if they really want to, but should not be trying to maintain the level of fitness that I am committed to. He also equates fat tummies with jolliness and contentment, whereas I look upon a beer belly and/or spare tyre with dismay and some disgust. My half of our very big study is being taken over by running magazines and books (my excuse is that I work for Women's Running). His half is mostly music books, dictionaries and encyclopedias and related reference books. We are separated by ceiling-to-floor shelving that holds about 10,000 music CDs (he writes about music). We are also separated by our opinions on body shape, aging, fitness, running and politics. It's surprising that we have any sort of a sex life, being so different and disagreeing so much, but we do, because runners like me have healthy libidos. Running is sexy.

Great Expectorations

1.05.2014

This evening to Hackney's Victoria Park to run for my club in the second Assembly League meet of the season. The rain, which had kept up for most of the day, did not abate for our race. This was not a problem, in fact it made the event more comfortable and we all enjoyed standing, panting in a cloud of hot-body-generated steam at the end. There were 16 of us running, and our fastest were in 1st and 2nd position, which means Kent AC girls are still on top.
My own race? I enjoyed it, and felt strong, so was dismayed to clock a super slow time of 26min, but then the course is longer than average (5.5k) and the faster women were only managing 22, so that puts it in perspective. The pun in the title is a reference to a point I've made before: men and their constant phlegm clearing. A man I just had to overtake was hawking and spitting all the way round, the one ahead was doing the same. Yet women do not feel the need. Do men have more phlegm, or do they feel that expectorating helps them to go faster?
I met the others in the club house to congratulate and congregate for the mass exodus to the pub. We drank beer  and chatted racing. I feel so envious of the women in their 20s and 30s who have so much scope for improvement. Am I stuck at this level because I am 51, or is there a way I can work on my times for these shorter distances? I feel I can push myself harder. Third woman Teresa told me how much pain and discomfort she's been in to clock her 22. The dfference is more than 4mins. It's a whole mindset, a realisation that I must kick out of that comfort zone. Perhaps I am too phlegmatic a runner, need to be choleric or sanfguine and whatever the other humours were (bilious? Certainly fast runners nauseate themselves when they try hard, and that has never happened to me).