Hi guys,
I'm travelling back to the UK tomorrow for a few days on urgent business. The good news is that, after creatively rearranging my hand luggage, I can probably bring along my running gear (along with my laptop and other items) and I may be able to fit a few runs over there. Hopefully the roads in the UK won't have any black ice with all the snow and icy cold weather they have been experiencing recently.
On the subject of running, I've had a bad day of running today. Sometimes in my eagerness of wanting to train hard and making every mile count, I can also lose sight of the importance of rest, recovery and taking things just a little bit easier. Unfortunately bad days are part and parcel of training, and they will happen. As a runner, you have to manage these as best you can, accept it, and learn to come up with a response to these bad days.
Before the run I was feeling rather flat for some reason. Perhaps I've been running harder than normal recently, or the stress of my urgent trip to the UK, or the lunch I had that afternoon (yes I'm guilty, I ate out today because I wasn't able to prepare lunch the night before) - I can't really say. When I'm feeling flat, I can still scrape a good run so that I feel like I've worked hard enough. Unfortunately, today was an interval session and to get through an interval session properly you must not be feeling flat beforehand.
The plan was to run 4 x 1000m intervals at 16.0 km/h pace. If all went well, then I'd throw in another one for good measure. After the mandatory warm up, I managed 2 x 1000m intervals at 16.0 km/h pace, with a 2 minute and 4 minute rest after each interval at 8.0 km/h pace. As I went for a third interval, I just had to stop after 300-400m. I felt as if I had no energy to carry on at that pace. To ensure the training wasn't a complete waste, I managed 5 x 200m intervals at 16.0 km/h pace, with a 30 second rest. That was also very difficult for me; it was also a struggle getting through that set of intervals. I left the gym feeling rather disappointed with myself.
The flip side is that bad days are a good indicator that something is not right with your training. Either the session was too hard, or I wasn't in good form for that level of training. I've just reviewed the training runs from last week, and noted that the majority of my runs have been quite fast - less than 5 mins/km, especially my easy runs. At this stage of training, my easy runs are probably on the fast side. The easy runs should get to that pace later on as training builds up.
So what would my response be to this bad day? There are two areas I will need to address. I'm thinking that I may need to cut back on the pace slightly for the longer intervals (shorter intervals are probably manageable for me at that pace). I may also have to put the brake on my easy runs as well so that they are around the 5 - 5.3 mins/km pace effort. Additionally I might devote a week of easy running (no intervals, no tempo runs) to get into a rhythm.
Having a bad day is not the end of the world. At least I'm not injured, yet! To close, here's a music video which shares my sentiment, also titled Bad Day. A great song, it's enough to put a smile on anyone's face. Enjoy!
Take care,
Aaron
