Leeds Marathon Training Week 2

Its's 14 weeks until race day, deceptively long enough to feel like a "long time away", but still only 14 weeks...which will race by! This is what I had planned for this week. 

Week	Monday	Tuesday	Wednesday	Thursday	Friday	Saturday	Sunday
2 27/01/25	Rest/Cross train	Run Club/60 mins	10 mins easy running 5 mins at marathon pace 2 mins recovery 5 mins at marathon pace 2 mins recovery 5 mins at marathon pace 10 mins easy running	Pilates/Cross Train	Swim/gym/rest	parkrun	100 mins easy

And here is what I actually achieved...

Monday - An actual rest day, I did do my 10 minutes of pilates in the evening to keep strengthening to avoid injury, and I maintained my step goal, but it was very much a day of rest otherwise.

Tuesday - I had volunteered to lead group 4 for Hyde Park Harriers and I'd re-used a route from a few years back towards the Cross Green Industrial estate and covering around 9KM aiming for a pace of between 6.00 - 6.25 per KM. I had managed to repress the memory of the 1000s of traffic lights and leading a big group of 20 meant there was an elapsed time of 1hr 1 minute, but only 45mins 48 seconds of moving time. Jane kindly pointed out that it was 7.40pm and I was only at the turnaround point, so I adjusted the return route, managed to avoid as many traffic lights and we were back in good time and covered 7.66KM with an average pace of 6.15 per KM. I then took my Garmin's suggestion and modified a sprint workout and run around the carpark. I skipped the 15 minute "warm up" and mostly focussed on the 15 second "sprint" segements which were different, but fun. I covered a total of 11.06KM across the two runs

Wednesday - You'll see in the plan I had a structured session, but I was quite tired and had slept badly and had a rare WFH day and the sun was shinning, so I listened to my body and went with a Garmin suggested recovery run and did 5.15KM in 33.56 over lunchtime and enjoyed the sunshine.

Thursday - It's always hard to train on Thursdays as I have Guides at the end of the day. The traffic is also awful and I was catching up with my new boss and I'd left for work early...only to be only 10 minutes in before my usual time as the traffic meant it took me more than twice as long as usual. So it was an enforced rest day, but I did my Pilates and maintained my step goal.

Friday - Working in recruitment, you occasionally qualify for things and get to go on exciting lunches so I went to Birmingham and had a lovely meal in a restaurant called "Pasture" very meat orientated! And I had an ale, a glass of fizz, a small glass of red wine and a couple of ale shandies. My Garmin always knows if I've had alcohol and it raised up my stress levels and I had a poor night of sleep, I did maintain my step goal at least wandering to and from train stations!

Saturday - As always it was parkun and we were on the out and back course at Pontefract still, I had a steady run for most of the run and in the last KM had a bit of a sprint finish and finished in 29.14.

Sunday - A long run day. We'd been discussing where to go for our long run and I remembered that at the start of Leg 1 of the Leeds Country Way you run along a section of the "Linesway" which I remember being reasonably flat and importantly free of traffic. Alan plotted a course of around 16KM which would take us around 100 minutes and fit in with both of our plans. We started off well, but ended up taking an accidental detour around very muddy bits of St Aidans and so there was a lot more walking involved as well as a trip to the visitors centre toilet! We parked in Garforth (it's not that far away from the train station if anyone else fancied doing it) and ran out and back, but with a loop at the end. The weather was gorgeous, but the end of the run was somewhat ruined by us crossing a road junction, being over the halfway point to have a man in a car aggressively beep his horn and tell us to look where we were going - an interesting comment given he drove up behind us and entered the road we were already crossing. Alan pointed out that we had right of way...although I'm not sure how well the lesson on the Highway Code had sunk in at that point!

Total week's activity of 38.6KM and I've chipped away at my 1000 mile goal and I'm now only 6.7 miles behind where I should be at this point in the year.