Sometimes it's good to mix the training up a little. It can get a bit repetitive on the same trail routes, especially when you're out for 4 hours at a time. This weekend my dear friend, and long suffering training partner (I talk his ear off every time we're out), G. had what seemed to be a great idea... a game. Now, G. is training to hike the same 100km ultra I'm aiming to run. He walks with speed and is built perfectly for it with a stride that is probably 30% longer than mine, and generally hikes a bit faster than I do. That said, I'm jogging about 40-50% of the distance I head out for at the moment. He had the bright idea for a pursuit challenge which went as follows.... His typical average 20km walk pace is about 5km per hour. My typical average pace where I run/walk is about 6km / h. So the rules were simple. We start together, he at his pace, and me at mine. He would walk out 10km on the planned route, and I would go out for 12km. His total 20km, mine 24km.
Based on our average speed we should turn around at the same time and meet up at the same time close to where we started from. It was a great idea.
How it played out...
So you can guess what happened.
Things felt great through to halfway turnaround. And then we checked the location of each other (shared through whatsapp) and inadvertently both of us sped up. LMAO!
He'll deny he started jogging little stretches, I'm sure, but basically we both went faster than we would normally go. I ran faster, at a higher heart rate than most of my normal training, and he power walked faster. It was a pursuit. I was chasing him. And that changes things. As pursuer, you can't help but want to catch the other person. As the one being pursued you want to make sure you don't get caught. It was surprisingly good fun to look at the location one minute and see you gaining, only to check again 10 minutes later to see that he had pulled forward. At one stage in the last 5km I saw his head torch (it was dark by that point) from about half a mile away, thinking I'll have him caught up with before we hit the final woods. Only to then see it bobbing along (at what suspiciously looked like a jog) the same half a mile in the final field we cross. It wasn't until I came out of the last set of woods a few hundred metres from our start point I caught up. Almost perfectly as we had planned.
We both admitted we went faster than we would normally, and that my legs were feeling pretty blitzed by the end.
And here's the thing...
It pushed both of us to move faster than we would normally. It was certainly too fast for both of us to currently maintain on a full ultra distance. And that not only serves to make you stronger; but also gives a valuable lesson to make sure that, when it comes to the main event, you go at YOUR pace, not anyone else's. Not over those kinds of distances.
My aim isn't to win. It's to finish. Granted, I have targets that I want to reach in terms of how long that takes, but overall I want to finish the full 100 running, rather than crawling.
It was an inspired way to stretch both of us taking on the same event but in different contexts, and create the opportunity to push each other harder using good old fashioned pride to do so. Each working to our own training plans while sharing some well needed giggles and banter along the way.
Unexpected benefits
48 Hours later and there are some advantages to having a session that beasted me more than usual. The first being how quickly I recover. The following day my legs were sore. Really sore (but the good sore rather than the injured sore) It was Mother's Day and we had a beautiful country walk planned with the family and the dog. You can imagine my first thought seeing the rolling hills when we got there. Moving the day after on very sore and tired legs for another 5 or 6K was a good exercise in 'active recovery'. Something that I'm seeing how quickly my body recovers before I think it's wise to run again. I estimate 2 days out from running and a slow jog would be good. This is great given my injury history as a run like Saturday would have taken me out of running for a week only a couple of months ago. The other benefit was a taste of how I move when my legs are hurting. When you have 5km to go and you know you're hitting a point where it's going to hurt. That's important to put into your head, that you've trained for that stage where everything is painful and you still have a distance yet to go. It's inevitable that I will feel like I can't run any more, but also so powerful to know I can trust in the training to get me to the end.
Thanks G. for the lesson.
Comments