Running Pleasure

Tuesday is long run day as usual and my running is still going well.

My normal Tuesday morning run in to work was even more pleasant than usual today. For my long run I wear a running belt that holds a couple of small bottles. On the back of the belt it says "Ironman". Since my long run starts straight out of work I wear the belt with empty bottles for my morning run. As I was plodding along this morning someone ran up beside me and said "Do you do Ironmans then?"

It was a fellow triathlete who, unlike me, has actually completed some Ironman races. We had a nice chat as we both ran in work in the centre of London. The guy, who's name I don't know, was a member of Crystal Palace Triathletes and asked whether I was a member of a club. Due to my split location existence, with the week spent in London and weekends in Somerset, it is difficult to fit in being part of a club. So I am not and end up doing 99% of my training by myself. Coming from a rugby background the social aspect of the sport is something I really do miss, though I suspect this is a case of me missing it rather than it not being there.

One positive aspect of training by myself is that I can train at my own pace. The painfully slow runs around Clapham Common that I did last year would probably have been done at a much quicker pace if I was running at the pace set by a group. However I believe those long slow runs laid the foundations for the improvements in my running that I am seeing now. Slowly but surely my running is improving. It is slowly getting faster and, probably more importantly, my endurance is improving so that a distance that was a real challenge to complete 9 months ago and took 36+ hours to recover from is now no problem at all.

Today's run was slightly faster and a little bit longer than last week. If I keep feeling strong to the end of the run and keep recovering well, I am going to slowly increase my run time up to 2.5 hours and then concentrate on improving my speed and my running off the bike.