With the Hutt river Trail ultra in the books, and with it going quite well for me, it’s now time to plan out what I’m going to do for the rest of the year. A couple of races are a given – the Wellington Marathon and the Wellington Urban Ultra (the WUU2K).
I had tenuous plans of running the Taupo 100km race later on in the year, but my wife has thrown a spanner into the works, which means that one might be off the cards. I still want to try for 100km race this year, but it’s looking like it will be a different race.
Why?
Because my wife has decided to return to Greece to visit her mother for four months. Having quit her job at the beginning of the year, now is probably the best time for her to make the trip back home and spend time with family. I plan to go over and finally visit Greece myself at some point during her stay, so she can show me around the place.
As long as we’re out on that side of the world, I’m planning on going back to the UK to show my wife some of my old haunts, and if possible, do a 100km race. It would make for an epic holiday, and you know how I feel about all things epic.
I have about seven months to train for it, using some smaller races here in Wellington to build up to the big race here – the WUU2K and giving me enough fitness to tackle the 100km race a month later. My training at the end of last year seemed to make a big difference to my performance. I’m running faster, easier, for longer.
Just yesterday I was back in the gym on the treadmill for the first time in ages and ramped the speed up to 15km/hr for a full kilometre. The best I could do previously was 500 metres and then I’d have to stop running until my heart rate recovered. This time I could go for the full kilometre and then dial the speed back to 1km/h and carry on with no problems.
I’m quite excited about that. It means I’m still improving and there is load of room for improvement still.
It’s looking like running every day is really helping build my fitness. So I’m going to aim to run 20kms every weekday morning before breakfast. Then in the evenings do another 20kms – all just running comfortably.
The exceptions might be Tuesdays and Thursdays when I take my wife to the gym. On those days I’ll do 10kms on the treadmill / or road but do it hard and fast.
The weekends, especially early on while my wife is still here will be rest days where I’ll do some strength work, and just hang out with my wife for a bit.
What’s missing from all that are the long runs. I think at the beginning of this building phase, not having long runs will be fine. I’ll start programming them in for the weekends after my wife leaves for Greece. By then I should have a much bigger fitness base than I have now and so the long runs will be even longer, and with any luck, I won’t get injured by doing them.
The 100km race that I have in mind is reasonably flat and on non-technical trails. The only problem I have is the time limit – 15.5 hours to get it done. That’s going to be really tight for me. So I’m really going to have to focus on getting faster and being able to maintain a fast pace for longer, and being able to recover faster when I stop to walk for a bit.
I get the feeling my body is in for a hammering over the next few months. But once it comes out of the forge it should be bright and shiny steel, ready for anything (or completely broken).
I’ll post as I go along so you can see how the training is progressing, and if it works, you might even want to try it yourself (depending on your level of stupidity).
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