Where Did That River come From?

Following last night's talk, I spent all day in work today thinking about how I can improve my training, even if it’s just slightly. I couldn’t stop thinking about it and was finding it really difficult to concentrate on getting my work done. I had to force myself to get on with my job all morning but then at lunch I decided to have a think about next week’s training plan.

I wrote myself a schedule, which included a speed session and a hill session (with options for these being either the club sessions or sessions I have made up myself), my usual long run on Sunday, a race on the Saturday (cross country) and then a couple of easy runs in between. I had to write Wednesday off altogether as I’m going out straight from work so won’t be able to fit in any training on that day. I have also included some yoga, pilates, core and balance board workouts. I used to do these a lot anyway but have let them slide lately. I feel like I have no time to myself but I’m really going to make an effort to get back to incorporating some non-running training.

The schedule starts on Monday so watch this space to see how it goes. Hopefully, as I’m writing it in here for all to see, this might make me feel more inclined to stick to it.

Tonight’s run was just an easy one to take me into the weekend. I seem to have a ridiculous fear (going back to my comment yesterday about my psychology) about overdoing it before a race and tiring myself out. I wouldn’t mind but the race isn’t until Sunday and it's only just over a couple of miles but I’m especially scared this time as it’s a team relay so there’s not just myself to think about. I really do need help to get over all these psychological issues I have. Perhaps a hypnotherapist would help? Anybody know a good one?

The weather was horrific tonight and I really didn't want to go out but, as usual, I forced myself and once out felt fine. The weather wasn't too bad until I got up to George's Lane from the Pigeon Tower side and it was awful up there. The clag was down and the hail was hitting my face. It was really windy too so hard to run against. My feet were already soaked at this point as the track up to the Pigeon Tower from the Terraced Gardens was like running through a stream.

When I rounded the bend after the Pike Race gate to the Pike, heading towards the kennels I found myself faced with a mass of water all the way across the path. I don't think I've ever seen so much water there before and it was still coming down really heavily so is probably worse still now.

I spent most of my run wading shin deep which sounds horrid until you think about poor Ruby - my shins are level with her head!

No running tomorrow because, as mentioned above, I’m scared of being too tired for Sunday’s race. Instead I’m planning on going for a nice walk with Ruby and trying out my map and compass skills a bit more.

Total distance - 5.05 miles

Oh Woe Is Me!

I was hoping to get to the club’s hill session tonight but, due to logistical problems, had to give it a miss. I instead took Ruby for a dreaded road run. I wanted to get a decent mileage in over a short period of time, which is why I opted for road. We ran up Factory Hill to George’s Lane and then along to Chorley Old Road. From there we ran to Doffcocker roundabout and then did a right to the traffic lights, then back on ourselves up Old Kiln Lane, back down Chorley Old Road and back along George’s Lane and Factory Hill. At the beginning I was starting to regret my decision to take Ruby on a road run because having her on a short leash is a nightmare. She just pulls and pulls and my shoulder was starting to really hurt. After a while though, she seemed to get used to my command of ‘back’ and started to stay more by my side, but still occasionally trotted out in front. Time to invest in a hands free lead I think.

Total distance – 7.45 miles.


After my run Duncan, Ruby and I went to the Jolly Crofters for our tea. We chose Jolly Crofters because the club had organised a talk by Olympian Steeplechaser, Stuart Stokes, at 8pm so I figured that we would have our tea there and then Duncan could drive home with Ruby and I’d stay for the talk.

The first part of the talk was about nutrition and looking after your body. Stuart quite rightly believes this is the most important thing to get right to become a good athlete. He expressed the importance of not eating unhealthy foods, including wheat, so bread and pasta are off the menu, unless you opt for the wheat free variety. In fact, pretty much anything which tastes good is off the menu! By this point I was feeling incredibly guilty about having just scoffed a plate of chicken tikka masala followed by chocolate fudge cake and accompanied by two glasses of full fat Coke.

He also mentioned that throwing your microwave in the skip, along with your non-stick pans was one of the best things you could do! Not sure how I will cook my porridge at work in the mornings as we only have microwaves, although Ali did suggest I take in my camping stove!

Stuart said that all the changes to diet he was recommending, individually, would only get you a one percent improvement but all those one percents would add up and, before you know it, you would have a twenty percent improvement.

This all got me to thinking… what do I actually want to gain from my running? I started out running just to get fit and so that I could eat chocolate now and then and not feel guilty about it. So do I really want to run AND not eat the chocolate? No way!

He then went on to talk about his training routines. I thought I was doing well at 40 miles per week but it appears everyone else in the club is doing way more than this, a good few running twice per day and getting in over 100 miles per week. I thought that because I’m already in work in Manchester at 7.30am that was a good enough excuse not to run twice a day but it appears that getting up and running at 4.30 in the morning takes place in some households.

I did come away feeling quite bad about myself because my lack of speed is all down to the fact that I don’t put in enough commitment. I want the results, but don’t want to make the effort to get there. I have no one to blame but myself and I'm well aware of this.

Don’t get me wrong, this was a really good talk which I enjoyed and was a great insight into how a pro-athlete goes about their day but Stuart did mention that in all his years of being a pro-athlete, he only enjoyed 32 minute of it!

I feel like I’m obsessing so much about running and race times lately that it’s sucking all the fun out of it and I really don’t want to get to the point where I’m enjoying it so little that I end up giving it up altogether.

It doesn’t help when I find out that the latest member of our ladies team, who has been picked for the A squad at the relays on Sunday, has only been running for a few weeks! How can somebody who has been running for such a short time be so fast and I, who has been running for a good few years, still be plodding along at, at best, a 7.45 minute mile pace? I know a lot of it is down to my lack of doing speed sessions and my eating habits and my psychology (don’t even get me started on that) but I’m pretty sure some of it must be down to genetics and raw talent, mustn’t it?

I think the conclusion from all of this is that if I have to stop eating all the foods I enjoy to become a good runner, I’m happy to stay in the mid-pack. I’ll compromise a little and make some changes, i.e. incorporating more speed sessions into my workouts and improving my core strength. I’ll also try to eat a bit more healthily and stop using my microwave so much. Now there’s a couple of percent…

Walkies!

This week I intended to run Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, miss out Saturday and then race on Sunday. It's going to be a very low mileage week as I'm not going to be able to fit in a long run due to racing on Sunday as I don't want to wear myself out the day before. I was planning on getting in at least 30 miles though but it has already started to go wrong.

I did six miles yesterday and intended to go out again tonight, but for some reason my hamstring is playing up. It's only a slight niggle but I don't want to mess myself up before the relays at weekend. I've never done a relay before and so don't want to let the team down.

I decided to go for a nice walk up on the tops with Ruby instead. We set off from home and went straight up towards George's Lane. En route, Ruby tried to kill Dave Jackson as he was flying down a slope towards us but Ruby was on her extension lead and Dave nearly ran between us both and would have gone flying over the lead. Luckily I was able to warn him in time and he managed to swerve us.

We went up to 2 Lads from George's Lane and then out onto the mast road. At the bottom of the mast road we saw Ruby's old owner, Sean, who was really happy to see her and scooped her up in his arms. Ruby seemed really happy to see him too, but not overly happy to see his other dogs who Ruby wasn't the best of friends with, hence her move to our house.

From there we just headed home via Foxholes.

Hopefully we'll be back running tomorrow but I don't envisage getting much mileage in at all this week. Ah well, it's good to have a rest once in a while (...so why does it make me feel so angry with myself?).

Distracted

When sitting down to write my blog of yesterday’s run, I firstly went on e-bay to try to buy myself a new, cheap camera for running with. I used to use my phone but have recently upgraded to a new one and, as with all fancy new phones, it’s massive and not really something I want to take running with me as it might weight me down. That and I don’t want to damage it.

So the other day I went to Asda and bought a £10 pay as you go phone purely for running with in case of emergency. Thing is, being a £10 phone, it doesn’t have any features other than phoning and texting and it occurred to me that, on my leisurely runs, I sometimes like to stop and take the odd photo or two. I therefore decided to buy a cheap very small camera and thought Ebay would be a good place to start.

I haven’t used the auction side of Ebay for a good few years now and forgot how exciting it can be. I had my sights set on a few Nikon Coolpix cameras all ending within the next twenty minutes so I had each of them open in different windows.

The first one I left until 20 seconds before the end before placing my bid – I was too hasty and got outbid with 5 seconds to spare.

The second and third went a similar way but on my fourth attempt I decided to be extra brave and wait until under 10 seconds remained. I got as far as 8 seconds and then flew in with my maximum bid of £31 and I won! £26 for a Nikon Coolpix S3300. It’s a non-fault customer return so is effectively brand new and has a manufacturer guarantee. The cheapest I have found this camera on the internet is £49.99 and that was for a refurbished one!

I love a good bargain.

Anyway, back to the point… the excitement of Ebay made me completely forget why I had gone on the internet in the first place – to write my blog.

It appears I have been distracted again from this as I haven’t yet mentioned anything about my run. To be honest, it was totally uneventful really.

Total distance – 6 miles.

(P.S. I have manually amended the date of this blog so that it appears on the day the actual run took place, even though I wrote it the next day)

Rain Rain Go Away!

After being caught out in the hail storm yesterday, I went out already in my Inov8 Mistlite over-trousers today as it was throwing it down outside and blowing a gale and I was intending to go up on the tops again.

Not long into my run though my back really started to ache (it’s been playing up for a while but Duncan stole my physio appointment the other day so I now have to wait until tomorrow to get it seen to) so I decided to stay low and we just went along to the top barn, did a loop round Dean Brook and then back along the side of Lower Rivington Reservoir.

I’m by no means a fair weather runner and am out no matter what – hail, sleet, snow, ice, you name it – but I really am getting sick of all this rain at the minute. Ruby isn’t impressed with it either and has to keep stopping to have a shake every five minutes. I wonder if you can buy a dog lightweight breathable running jacket? If not, Dragon’s Den anyone?

It’s been a good week running-wise and I’ve managed to get a good few miles in (although compared to most of my running friends 40 miles is nothing!). Next week won’t be as mile heavy though as I’m not going to be able to fit in a long run. I think I’m due a nice easy week anyway so I’ll be all fresh for the relays next Sunday. My first relay! Scary!

Total distance – 5.05 miles

Week’s total distance – 40.20 miles

Apologies – I Appear to have Rambled on a Bit

I made a decision a couple of days ago that for my long run this weekend, I would do a route out of my ‘West Pennine Walks’ book, one which would take me over ground I haven’t covered before, so that I could try to brush up on some navigation skills. I decided not to take Ruby with me on this run because I wasn’t sure where it would take me and I didn’t want to end up running through fields of cows with her because, as mentioned in an early entry, people have been telling me horror stories about going near cows when with a dog and this has scared me a little bit.

The route I chose (entitled ‘Great Hill – Great Walk’) was down as being 11 miles in the book but it started in Belmont so I decided to get Duncan to drop me off there and then at the end of the run I would get back to Belmont and then go up over the top of Winter Hill back to Horwich so I worked out that it would be around 14 miles.

So Duncan dropped me off in Belmont and I set off along Belmont Reservoir. I went over the dam and then turned left up to Higher Pasture House Farm where I stopped to take a (very poor quality) picture of Winter Hill.

After going through the farm yard, I continued along the path to Lower Pasture Barn Farm, and then straight on until eventually coming out on the road to Tockholes. From here, I turned left and headed to the main road (A675) between Belmont and Abbey Village. I crossed over, ran along a bit to the right and then through the gate on the left and along a track through the moorland. There was a nice track for a while but this then turned into a complete bog which was pretty hard to run through and went on for quite a while. It was whilst following this track that I lost my bearings for the first time. I was supposed to descend to a trial shaft and then turn right by a fence over a stile but I didn’t come to any of this. I did get back onto the same track as the book though as I used my map and navigated to a wall which I followed. I then climbed up to Great Hill which wasn’t as tough as I had expected.

At the top of Great Hill I got my bearings and decided which path I needed to take. I bumped into another runner up on the top and he just so happened to be a navigation expert and he assured me that the path I had chosen was the correct one.

Once I got to Drinkwaters Farm I stopped to take a picture of ‘Joe’s Cup’. For those of you who don’t know, this is a plaque on a wall (see picture) and when some of the bricks in the wall are removed there is an old tin cup which a fell runner (named Joe would you believe) kept there so that he could use it to scoop up some water from the stream whilst out on a run and have a drink.

Just around the corner from Joe’s Cup, I bumped into Ed and John Swift. We had a bit of a natter and then Ed and John were going separate ways, Ed’s way being the same as mine. We headed down towards the quarries and then out to White Coppice. At this point Ed left and went back to Rivington and I continued along to the cricket ground. I walked through here for a bit so I could eat a cereal bar I had brought with me, and I got chatting to a couple with three Labradors. I walked along with them up to White Coppice Farm and then continued on my own. I ran through some farm fields and then out onto a narrow road and then turned off the road and went over a bridge and continued into some woods. I got slightly off track in the woods as the instructions in the book weren’t terribly good at this point but I soon found my way through and up onto the road. I then ran along the road to Jepson’s Gate and made my way to the Bomber Memorial. I was now fully aware of where I was and didn’t need to navigate but still wanted to carry on with the walk in the book, rather than just making my own way. The book took me down to Lead Mines Clough and then up the steep embankment at the other side, out into the farm field. I crossed the field until I got to the track and continued along this to a ruin named ‘Simms’. This is where I made my worst navigational error but, again, it’s because I was trying to make sense of the directions in the book which weren’t at all clear. The book told me to leave the track at this point and head towards a waymaker which was across boggy ground. It then told me to stay parallel with the track I had just left until the path I was on turned sharp right. The thing is, the ‘path’ I was on was just a total bog so it was really difficult to work out which way it went. There was mention of a bridge going over a stream but I think the bridge I went over was the wrong one.

After lots of wading through bogs, I finally made it back to a path that I knew and headed the way I thought I was supposed to. I did eventually get back on track but I had come to the next junction from the opposite direction to which I should have done!

I went past Higher Hempshaws and followed the path towards ‘Will Narr’. I then turned right to come out onto Rivington Road. I ran along the road for about 50 metres and then crossed the stile on the left and ran along the ridge back into Belmont.

Once back at Belmont, I made my way around the Blue Lagoon, which is when the weather started to turn. From here I made my way up to the top of winter Hill along the route of the Belmont Winter Hill Fell race. I was really tired at this point and walked the majority of the hill. The weather got really bad whilst I was climbing with very strong wind and hailstone pelting me all the way up. I started to get a bit worried really because I was moving quite slowly and was worried I’d get too cold. It seemed to take ages to get to the top and the weather was getting worse and worse. By the time I did reach the top I was saturated. My hands were freezing because my gloves were completely soaked.

I got onto the mast road and decided to stay on this for a while because I knew I could get a decent speed up on it and that would hopefully help keep me warm.

I turned off the mast road, cutting the corner down to George’s Lane. From there I went down through Wilderswood. By this point I was really cold. Even though I was running at a good pace my legs were so wet that I was starting to lose feeling in them. The thing is, I had kit with me, including waterproof over trousers but I didn’t want to stop to put these on because the weather was so bad that I thought stopping would just make me get colder even quicker.

I realise now how easy it is when fell running to get cold and get into big trouble. I’m so glad I was wearing decent kit – OMM smock and, surprisingly, my Crane Sports (Aldi) thermal base layer which I must say I actually prefer to my Helly H!

I’ve never been so glad to walk through my front door but my hands were so numb I struggled to get my key out of my bag, put it in the lock and turn it. Once I managed to get through the door, all I wanted to do was strip out of my soaking clothes but, again, due to numb hands, I couldn’t undo my laces to get my shoes off. Nobody was home to help me so I had to struggle for ages to get them undone. When I finally managed to get my shoes off, I stripped off there and then, right inside my front door as I couldn’t keep the wet clothes on any longer - good job the postman didn't turn up at this point as we have a glass panel next to the front door! I was really shivering and threw all my clothes onto the floor - my leggins even made a huge 'splosh' sound as they landed - and ran upstairs and straight into the shower. The warm water of the shower actually hurt my freezing cold hands which wasn’t very pleasant at all.

I’m now sat on the couch having just devoured a tin of hot soup with four slices of bread but I’m still struggling a bit to get warm, despite having turned my heating up to 24 degrees.

It really does show how dangerous it can be out there.

Total distance – 15.85 miles

Twice as Nice

I had a day off work today as I had to drive Duncan to the hospital for his follow up appointment at 8.45am. My body clock was still in work mode though and I was lying awake staring at the ceiling at 5.30. By 6.15 I thought I might as well go out for a run and make the most of the morning.

There was still some slushy snow on the ground when we set off and it was a bit slippery crossing Cotswold Drive. We ran down to the school and then along to top barn. From there we just did a bit of a loop down Sheephouse Lane and then back up to top barn and back home again. It wasn’t a very long run but I didn’t have much time before having to set off for the hospital.

It was a really nice run though as there wasn’t another human being in sight. We did pass a group of deer though, some rabbits, squirrels and possibly a hare. I say possibly because I didn’t think we had hares round here as I have never seen one before but, if it wasn’t a hare, it was one HUGE rabbit!

Obviously Ruby tried to chase them all!

Distance – 4.1 miles



As this morning’s run was a bit of a short one and as I was off work, I decided to go out again this afternoon. We set off just after 3pm and again ran towards top barn. From there we ran over to Pigeon Tower car park and then up to the Pigeon Tower via the steep rocky road (I think this is actually the bottom of George’s Lane). The weather up on the top of George’s Lane was dreadful, blowing a gale and throwing down. Made me realise how good my OMM smock is though. We stuck to George’s Lane today and just ran to Factory Hill, down and then across Brinks Row and back home. Nothing exciting to report on this run really but, again, I didn’t pass anyone else whilst I was out.

Distance – 4.95 miles

Total distance – 9.05 miles


Oh and, by the way, Duncan’s follow up appointment went well. He was told that he can drive again and can get back out mountain biking.