Taking Stock

Over the last week the weather locally has been quite conducive to getting out for a jog. Bright conditions but very cold for the first few days, finally ending up cloudy and wet by the end of the week. On Tuesday I went for a slightly longer jog than has been usual lately. From Richmond park gate out in a loop through the centre of the park, over to the perimeter track and back until I picked up the last mile of the ParkRun course, the bit with the hills. It was a pleasant enough jog and I was able to trot along at a slightly improved pace to the previous week. At about three and a half miles there is an additional hill of about another half mile incline and I was able to up the rate on the slope. Joining onto the usual course I pushed the pace on the other hills which was hard going but ended up as a reasonably successful six mile session.   1) 8:40.  2) 8:43. 3) 8:38. 4) 9:03. 5) 12:04  6) 11:19

Back to Bushy on Thursday for the ParkRun course again. This time though I planned a fairly easy intervals session. After about a mile warm up I did the first half mile of the course at a steady jog and then pushed the second half mile rather faster. This was repeated for the other two miles using the first half miles for recovery and pushing the second halves. Taking splits with the Timex now gives me a target to do better than next time. The times for the recovery period are a bit erratic and there's definitely room for improvement as the recovery time became steadily longer.
 1) 4:13 / 3:42.     2). 5:46 / 4:00.     3)  6:50. / 4:01.

I'm still postponing getting into a boat as the wrist remains a bit painful although it does seem to be settling down while everything else seems to have got to a more or less serviceable condition. It does feel though that it's fragile enough that if I tried it out hard enough I could knock back its recovery very easily. Currently I'm using a brace on the wrist while jogging or driving to prevent any inadvertent excessive movement and stretching exercises two or three times a day to get back to the correct range of movement. Those two things do seem to be counter productive, but at the moment it seems to be working, although very very slowly. I'm hoping to try out in a boat some time in the coming week and maybe get some regular paddling in.

Anyhow, on Saturday morning I delivered Ellie back to the club for their coaching session while I took another jog along the canal towpath. Last week I'd jogged just four miles with an encouraging feeling of performance and the regular jogs over the last weeks has seen a weight loss of just under a half stone. This Saturday it had been raining heavily throughout the night and the path was covered with puddles. It slowed thing down a little having to break pace continually to jump some of the larger ones. I extended the jog a little to 4.6 miles in total with only a short walk at the half way turnaround point. The trip went fairly well, if anything a little better than last week although I got saturated in the process. Although it went well, it would probably have been more productive from the effective training point of view, to have done the ParkRuns instead. Nevertheless the times were:-  1) 9:03.  2) 8:45.  3) 10:29.   4) 9:24.    5) 5:37

It's very pleasant to go for a jog around one or other of the local ParkRun courses, but it's becoming a bit time consuming to get there and get ready. I really need to be able to get some of the jogging a bit closer to home to cut down on the tine expended on it. Luckily I do have the local recreation ground which is a lot closer, almost within jogging distance in fact. I measured out the ground's playing field dimensions with the old Garmin to see what the parameters are. Given that it's an almost square field with few obstructions it's got an almost clear run of between 0.12 to 0.14 miles per side. The total distance around the outside is almost exactly a half mile, with two laps being a mile. This makes it quite useful to program any set of intervals up to a mile in distance so I can cut the travelling time for at least one session.