Quick update

Anniversary cake made by Angela, a fellow Greyhound - yum, yum

It's been a busy week, so just a quick update for you. Wonderful weather accompanied my return to parkrun to celebrate Stamford Park Parkrun's 1st anniversary! There were 101 runners, I got a course PB of 27m 1s and there was celebratory cake in the cafe afterwards - all the wins!

I'm also making a concerted effort to run more each week, trying to increase mileage as a strategy to better my running form, efficiency and capacity and therefore make me quicker at the shorter distances I'm currently racing. There's no real science to how far I need to run, just that I need to run more. Finding time for that is difficult, but I've added Monday nights to my run schedule to see how that goes.

10% weekly increase is recommended to avoid injury, so I aimed for 33km last week and fell a bit short with 31.7, but that's close enough for me. This week I'm aiming for 36km. I'll then have a 2 week blip as I taper next week and then race 10k distances twice the week after. But eventually I will get up to around 40km/week mark. An average week for me should then look like this:

Monday - solo run, around 10km
Tuesday - Greenfield Greyhounds club run, around 10km
Thursday - run with subset of Greyhounds, around 12km
Saturday - solo training run, around 7km / parkrun, around 5km

So my new Monday run this week was a hot 10k round Dovestones. But that's good, because the Great Run has a history of being hot and I wanted to see how I would hold up. I was pleased with it. There were a couple of 0.35km climbs that I walked for 4 mins each in order to conserve energy - removing those factors from my end result gave me a 51 minute time for 9.8km. Not a precise race simulation, but good confirmation I'm still around my target sub-50. One more intervals training session this weekend and then taper for the big race!