Dan’s Journey from Abingdon to London. Part 2.

During the week before I ran October’s Abingdon marathon, I was lucky enough to get one of the HPH club places at the London marathon in April 2017. I promised to blog about the training and build up … Part 1 came just before Abbey Dash, my last race of 2016, and this is Part 2!

Abbey Dash went well considering it was only 2 weeks post Abingdon – I’d cycle-commuted 96 miles in-between the two races but had only run twice, so wasn’t sure how the legs would feel once the race kicked in. Ended up with 41:38, marginally faster than at the comparable Bradford 10K & Leeds 10K earlier in the year, so was pretty content. The next week was a “getting back into it week” where I alternated bike and run commutes (ran in/cycled home, cycled in/ran home, etc) and ended the week with a 14 mile long run and 34 miles in the run-bank. Then I started The Plan!

The Plan: To break things up, I settled on a basic schedule of 12 weeks of “10K training” ending at Dewsbury followed by 12 weeks of “marathon training” ending at VLM. During this I would be primarily on a low carb / high fat diet to get myself used to using fat for fuel rather than glycogen (see Part 1 for the “why?”). Between Abbey Dash and Xmas Eve, I ate very little carbohydrate and was surprised at how little it affected my running, including intervals and parkruns, suggesting that the fat-adaptation had already taken place in the Abingdon campaign. The basic weekly routine during the first 12 week period was planned as 44 miles bike commuting and about 35 miles running, broken down as:

Mon: 2 x bike commute (10.6 miles).

Tues: 2 x bike commute (11.3 miles) & aerobic interval session (5-6 miles with 2.5-3 miles “work”).

Wed: 2 x bike commute (11.3 miles).

Thurs: 2 x run commute (10 miles, easy pace).

Fri: 2 x bike commute (10.6 miles).

Sat: parkrun (5 miles with 3.1 miles “work”).

Sun: Long run (15 miles easy, usually including the Leeds HM route).

The older I get, the more the body appreciates recovery days and I find the Mon/Wed/Fri cycle-only days perfect for this. Naturally, like any plan it was flexible and needed spontaneous re-jigging to fit in with real life but in general it worked out quite well. Great to have six 15 mile runs in the bag already (as well as a 14 and a 12) – they’re grim as it entails a 7am start but I’ve only missed the one so far (New Year’s Day!). Meanwhile, parkruns have gone 20:36, 20:25, 20:20, 20:16 and a rather fatigued 21:03 last Saturday. The Tuesday lunchtime intervals have ranged from 400m to 1200m sessions at something like 1 mile to 3K pace. I didn’t bike commute over Xmas/NY, and the holidays were a bit disruptive to training and LC eating, but actually it went quite well considering. The regime was fully re-implemented on 1st Jan alongside side Dry January (possible to be extended all the way to VLM).

Nevertheless, despite the consistency, I don’t feel like I’m improving much all that much at the moment … but I’m trying to resist the temptation to “do a bit more” as that usually ends up with niggles and injury (“Better to be 10% undertrained than 1% over trained”, John “hadd” Walsh RIP). So, the plan is to continue this regime for 4 more weeks until Dewsbury 10K, after which I’ll swap out the Tuesday interval session for a 10 mile sub-LT/MP run and also start to ramp up the long run distances. Although I’ll probably peak at only 48 miles per week, I think the extra 44 mpw on the bike compensates for the missing “recovery run mileage” and so it will be more like a 55-60 mpw training load over much of this period. So far so good … Part 3 will come in after Dewsbury and once the 12 week “marathon training” section is underway!

Dan Donnelly