Posts Tagged ‘running’

Between Venla arriving and the nights being cold and dark, I have not been for a run up the canal this year. That changed last week when I finally got out there. It felt good.

My times have really slowed down in January. I went from almost setting a personal best at the first Parkrun of 2017, to struggling to keep it under 30 minutes for the rest of the month. My weight has not changed, so I wonder if Christmas turned all of my muscle into fat. I am hoping that bumping back up to two training sessions a week will reverse this decline.

It has been a good year for running. So far this year I have already smashed a bunch of records. I ran my first half marthon, went sub-60 in the Leeds 10k with an amazing 59:59 and then butchered that in the Abbey Dash with 56:45.

Parkrun has been going well too. My personal best of 28:50 had stood since 2014. However, I beat that in August, setting a new time of 28:11. This was the first time I had gone sub-28 in two years. On the 3rd of December, I beat it again, setting a new record of 27:16.

How? I have no idea. I suspect the timing was off. To take almost a minute off your personal best is suspicious: even if I have taken about 10 minutes off my 10k time this year. How long will this stand for? Probably a while. Though I have managed to repeat a sub-28 time in the two Parkruns since as well.

On Saturday, I am touristing it up at Temple Newsam Parkun, where my dad will be doing his 100th run. My personal best there is 29:29, so that is the target.

Earlier this month I took part in the 31st Abbey Dash.

It was the first time I had run the Dash. However, it is not a race I do particularly well. Last year, I set a personal worst over 10k. This year looked like to be a repeat of previous years: old and wet.

Luckily Jane and Rob were already there when I turned up and Chris and Carley turned up later too. Usually, I am stood around by myself for the hour you have to wait, so it was nice to feel like I had some friends for a short while.

Organisation was improved. They only do one water point (Run For All does two) but they did text me my result this year. There was still stuff to fix, though. They let the sub-60 and sub-70 pens go at the same time. I was at the back of the sub-60 pen, so I was running behind a lot of the sub-70 runners. By the finishing straight, I was literally having to push my way through, and it slowed me down a lot.

Despite my previous bad times, I was hopeful. So far in 2016 I had run my first half marthon, set a personal best at Parkrun and run my first sub-60 over 10k when I managed a 59:59 in the Leeds 10k in July. My faith was rewarded: I brought it home in 56:45 setting a new 10k PB.

Given my recent slip into bad BMI I’ve been working on losing some weight. So I have been playing around with some tools to help me.

Apple Health

Health is one of the apps that Apple forces on you. I had never actually used it. However, when I opened it, it turned out that it had spent the last year counting every step I make. That is both horribly invasive and rather interesting. I am averaging 7,500 steps per day.

You can record body metrics such as weight and then have them plotted on a graph. This makes sense. Why I would need to regularly record my height and plot that on a graph though is unclear. Perhaps it is aimed at children and the shrinking elderly?

MyFitnessPal

I am using this to record my diet. Yep, I have become one of those calorie counting wankers. You put in your weight, target weight and target period to lose said weight, and it gives you the number of calories you need to restrict yourself to per day. This goes up and down as you exercise and eat, giving you a number of calories left for each day: I have 785 spare so far, which I could spend on two chocolate chip muffins…

I can also record exercise on it. This will be useful when I exercise without my phone, such as American football training. For running, I use the app below.

MapMyRun

I have used MapMyWalk for years but now I am upping the ante by using the run version. It is actually the exact same app. When you log a work out in one it immediately appears in the other. Also, once you have synced one with MyFitnessPal, they are all synced. They are all Under Armour apps, so you would expect them to work pretty well together and so far they do.

Results

After three months I had managed to drop 8kg. This was working off net 1500 kcals per day, which I hit almost every day. A few days I was a few hundred kcals over the limit, but on others I was up to 1,000 below the limit (due to large amounts of exercise) so I was definitely below the limit on average.

However, I then spent a week on my honeymoon and put 2kg back on.

Conclusion

I have a new found respect for anyone trying to lose weight. It is really difficult. At net 1500 kcals per day, which is the maximum my app allows, you can just about fit three meals in, but no snacks or beer in. After all of this, I was only losing 0.5kg per week. Then just a single week off ruined a month of work.

Of course, it could be that if you are significantly overweight it is easier to shift the first lot of kilos. However, it really is hard work and difficult to find the motivation when it piles back on so easily.

When you run a 10k, there are often people taking photos of you on the way round. I usually ignore them because I look awful in the photos, but the ones from this year’s Run For All Leeds 10k look better than normal.

The thumbnails are all square, and therefore chop my head off, but if you click them I do have a head somewhere.

I ran my first Run For All Leeds 10k in 2014, achieving a time of 1:06:14. Despite it being a hot day this was faster than both my subsequent Abbey Dash times and remained my personal best 10k race time. This year’s Leeds 10k was also warm (19 degrees) but cloudy (and still cooler than the half marathon!).

I have been running better than ever before in training so I was hoping to knock a significant block off my personal best, and for a stretch target try and run a sub-60 time.

Unfortunately, things were off to a poor start. The 60-minute pacer was right at the front of the green group (athletes predicted to run 60+, I think) so I couldn’t get close to her. By the time I had crossed the starting line she was out of sight. I only saw her at the turnaround point, at which time she was way head of me.

My GPS said that I was running a sub-60 time. However, it kept reporting I was ahead in distance: it would give me my kilometre split before I reached the official marker points and clocked my total 10k distance at 10.26km. When I clocked my final time via GPS I was at 1:00:10. 10 seconds over the hour!

I had given it my all, and come up short.

Run For All usually text you your official time straight however. Mine never arrived, so I faced a nail-biting wait in the pub while waiting for the official times to be posted.

Finally, it arrived.

My time was 0:59:59. The slowest possible time you can run while still being under an hour. But it was under an hour. I had taken 6:15 off my personal best. An incredibly fortunate ending.

I really like the way Run For All run their events. My race pack and race number arrived on time. They have markers at every kilometre, plenty of water, pacers every five minutes and even though my my text never arrived, the results were available online within a few hours.

I have considered doing a half marathon on and off for a couple of years. There are lots of good reasons not to do it though: for example it’s really hard, hurts a lot and requires a lot of training. And all you get out of it is the feeling that you have done, which isn’t that amazing, because it’s only half a full marathon.

However, with a less intense flag football season this year, being on a fitness drive, and this being my last chance before a tiny human started cutting into my free time, it seemed like a good year to go for it.

Half marathons are a whole new level from 10ks. 10k is pretty easy. If you run regularly, which I do, you don’t really need to do that much training. When I’m going through a good period, a 5k and a 10k is my weekly programme. Half marathons are a step up. After 10k my knees start to go. I get back pain. Things start to chafe and bladder control is put to the test.

Being on the 8th of May, this meant I was doing most of my training in March and April. If you will remember, April was really cold. I did most of my training in the early morning or evening, in not much above freezing.

Roll on May, and a week before the marathon it suddenly becomes incredibly hot (for Britain) and everyone is scrabbling around for barbecues. Including me. On the day in question, it was 23 degrees. I had done all my training with my leggings on, to help support my knees, so I didn’t want to change it for the day. Which made for a warm experience.

I had put my target time down as 2:15:00, but quickly had to re-evaluate this when I realised I had not factored in all the hills (I run up the canal in training, which is relatively flat). Then again when it suddenly hit 23 degrees. In the end, I ran a 2:28:00. I think I would have been disappointed to slip over 2:30:00, so this was fine. And sure, there were people who ran it in less than half of that time. But how many children did they high-five? I mean, anyone can win the slalom if they don’t go round the flags.

I was so tired by the time I finished. I found a patch of ground in the shade and sat down to take a drink. After a few minutes I got up to go find Elina, only to realise I was going to have to sit down again and eat some snacks from the goodie bag before I was going to be in a position to walk anywhere.

Luckily, once I had regained the use of my legs, my beautiful support crew was there to greet me with more drinks and snacks. We took 17 photos, the one below was the best we could get.

The advantage of living in town is that I could go home, have a quick shower, and then go back out for lunch. As we walked out again I passed a number of other runners who were very confused by my combination of jeans and finisher’s t-shirt. We ended up at Blackhouse, where I highly recommend the t-bone as recovery steak, and the ribeye if your pregnant wife needs a well-done piece of beef.

One thing I like about the Run For All series is how well organised they are. I’ve only run the Leeds 10 and Abbey Dash, so I don’t have a huge range of comparisons, but Run For All seem to do a good job: clearly-marked pacers, easy to access water stations, start on time and you get your result within seconds of crossing the line.

Has this experience inspired me to run a full-length marathon? Dear god no.

If you run far enough up the Leeds Liverpool Canal, you eventually reach the Rodley Barge pub. How you actually get over the canal to have a pint is less clear. However, it does make a convenient place to stop and turn around. This could well be the furthest I ever run up the canal as I don’t have any plans to do longer distances.

Continuing from my post about running last week, I made it even further up the cancel this time. I actually ran a 2km shorter distance. However, without half of the canal being closed by police causing me a large detour, I was able to go further.

I got as far as Newlay Locks, which is a set of locks by Bramley Fall Park.

Last week, finding myself with a bonus day off, I set off up the canal to see if I could set a new distance record. The furthest I have been is just past the Hollybush Conservation Centre. Hollybush makes a nice 5km landmark, and I’ve been about half a kilometre past this.

Unfortunately, my new effort got off to a rocky start. The police had closed one of the junctions of the canal: the one by Kirkstall Viaduct. This was the only access point for quite a while, so I had to go all the way back to the Armley Gyratory, up Kirkstall Road, and then back down on to the towath at Armley Mills, just to progress 30 metres down the canal.

Eventually I did progress on. It turns out that there isn’t much to see. There is some flat countryside, the train line and river continue to intertwine, and there is a few more locks. That is pretty much it. Peaceful though.

Here is a photo of me looking gormless:

I turned round after that and went home. Then spent my hard-earned calories on Easter Eggs.