Month: July 2010

If you don’t want to read about one man’s struggle in the face of the insuperable; about sweat, blood, and grit (whilst humming the montage music from Rocky, preferably) look away now. *tumbleweed blows across blog* O.K., just me then. Still recording it for posterity.   Before I went for my assessment weekend for the T.A.,in April I’d knocked out a few 1.8 mile runs. This I sporadically doubled up to my last blog entry  (June 13th) when I had managed one run of 7.2 miles. That was pretty heroic. I then started loosely following a training plan to get up to half marathon standard. The plan gave distances, but not speeds. Knowing nothing about it I was basing my time on the one person I knew who ran, a Twitter chum, @Suzywong30 who said a good speed would be about 8 minutes per mile. (To be fair she said that because on my shorter runs I thought I was averaging about 7½ minutes per mile.) The other snippet I gleaned was from the half marathon website where I read that up to a cut off point of 1 hour 40 minutes, you got an exact ranking and time in the race results. After that just position. The implication being, it seemed, that that was a respectable time, anything over than that was just ‘also ran’. The maths on that seem to say that if you are running over 7 minute 40 second miles, you are not going to get a time.   So I was aiming for 8 minute miles as I built my stamina. It said on the plan to up your ‘long’ run by 1 mile a week. I was at 7 miles. I did an 8 miles, again nearly killing me. Then, fairly soon after I tried for a 9 mile run (that was the 10th July) which I was really pleased to have finished in 1 hour 13 minutes. I was nearly dead by the end of it, but just chuffed to get that far. The more I was running the more daunted I was becoming by the prospect of the full 13 miles. There’s only one way to get over that kind of apprehension, so on the 13th instead of the planned 4 mile warm up run I went the distance. 13 miles, 1 hour 46 minutes of graft. Go me!   In less than 2 months I’ve gone from a sweaty, wheezing unfit bastard who could barely manage to run 1.8 miles, to a sweaty, wheezing unfit bastard who can barely run 13 miles! Yay!   The twist in the tale came yesterday. Some other newbie runner was asking advice on a training plan. I suggested the plan I’d been loosely following, someone else came back with the BUPA training plan.They said it was better so I took a look.   It says newbies should aim for a run time of about 11-12 minutes per mile, which you can knock down to 10-11 […]

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