Monday: Gym session with PT instructor – leg strengthening exercises, tombstone, interval sprints on the rower.

Tuesday: 4 mile easy run

Wednesday: Cycled 6 miles

Thursday: cycled 12 miles, 30 min tempo run – 10mins @ 5:06min/K

Friday: 6 mile cycle

Saturday: 7.5 mile endurance run – horse track in Richmond Park

Sunday: Rest

The problem with 12 hour night shifts is they completely screw with your life. I started night shifts on Monday, and will not finish until Monday morning coming. So, once again – I have gone slightly off plan, although not as much as last week – at least I got my 3 mandatory runs in, plus some cycling and a gym session. I also managed to get a full 24 hours without strenuous exercise Friday morning to Saturday morning which meant when I work up today (Saturday) to go for my long run, I felt quite fresh.

So, what have I learnt this week – tombstones are evil – well, actually it’s a sit-up burpee – so…. Burpee’s are evil!! For some colour, here is a cat doing a burpee….

Anyway, Jack PT taught me a couple of interesting exercises which will help me develop my endurance for those tough mud sand and bog races that I’ve got coming up, the first in 2 weeks’ time. I also did some interval sprits on the indoor rower – a machine I am particularly fond of and was powering through 200 meters in 40 seconds – I was on for something faster on my fifth and final sprint but I took off – or rowed off – at 37 meters/stroke (my fast is around 30) and was unable to sustain the pace – fearing cardiac arrest

I was nervous about the tempo run on Thursday – having to sustain 5:10min/K for 10 minutes felt a little daunting as I headed off towards the Thames riverside and I still doubted my ability to sustain the pace as I began my tempo section. I was concerned that I would be constantly adjusting my pace, this was true but instead of the Garmin screaming ‘run faster’ it was telling me to slow down. Either, my Garmin is a little faulty or I am fitter than I think, I cautiously thought it was the first, although now I suspect it is the second of my two statements.

My plan on Saturday was to run home from work and cover the 7-8 mile slog in that fashion but after struggling with the most basic of data-entry duties an hour into my shift, I decided that maybe a post sleep run would be better. So at 4pm, this afternoon, I headed out into the park, with my trail shoes, and took to the horse track. It had been raining during the day but now the sky was that lovely autumn blue. The park felt very wild and was quite windy, I also had to make a couple of course corrections to avoid an impressively sized herd of deer – they are a bit nervous at the moment because the autumn cull has just begun. It took me 1:10 to run the horse track circuit – although the last 20 minutes were pretty scary as it had gotten really dark and I had left my headtorch at home which meant had to run along a track that I couldn’t see with the deer calling all around me – doubly scary when you cannot actually see them and they sound like they are about to trample you.

For the next couple of weeks, this summery will contain some additional data:

 nanowrimo word count: 0 – it’s National novel writing month don’t you know – 2 days in and I’m already behind

runningbug #noexcuse challenge: 92.3 miles to go – the running bug have a new challenge, I have pledged to run 100 miles this month – 15 more than the plan dictates so should be fun to try and achieve.