After the slight injury niggle that I wrote about it my last blog, I'm really pleased to report that that I had a great week's training. Unfortunately there was no time for any hills, but I upped the mileage to 100 miles and ran another 60km on Saturday!
Sometimes rest days are just as important as trainining days so after running my first 60km I decided to take 2 rest days to allow some extra recovery time. It seemed to do the trick as I've had no injury worries since :)
On Tuesday I visited Kew Gardens (The Royal Botanic Gardens) for a day out. I was particularly keen to experience the 'tropics zone' in the Palm house to see some of the Jungle plant species and also feel the heat and humidity there. It gave me a good idea of how humid its going to be and even walking up a small flight of stairs to see the 'canopy' was hard work!
I ran home from Kew, which was around half a marathon and then I followed this up with another half marathon on Wednesday.
I then ran a slow 36km around Hyde Park on Thursday and followed this up with a nice cold ice bath!
Apparently ice baths speed up recovery by draining the blood from the legs and then when you get out of the bath and warm up, fresh oxygenated blood fills the legs.
I had another rest day on Friday with a massage, before the dreaded 60km on Saturday! I followed exactly the same route as I did the week before and this time I stayed much better hydrated (I drank 2.5 litres of fluid made up of 3 0.5L electrolyte waters, a lucozade and a powerade).
Even without high energy jelly beans I knocked 25 minutes of my previous time (finishing in 4 hours 45 minutes and averaging 12.6km/h, which is 3 hours 20 minute marathon pace) and that included wading along the flooded river bank in Richmond- excellent Jungle preparation!
I also got chance to test some of the UVU gear that is similar to what I'll be wearing to race in! It's all top secret as it's not been released yet, but I can tell you it does some really cool temperature regulation stuff!
I decided to train on the Sunday as well rather than resting- I have to get used to running far on consecutive days and so I ran another half marathon on the Sunday.
A really good week's training, but now my focus has to be on hills! With just 3 weeks to go until I fly to Brazil, I'm going to put myself through some really tough hill training sessions rather than long runs!
No comments:
Post a Comment