Mind games and progression

It’s Monday the 9th of July , so it’s been 8 weeks since I’ve updated you all. So what’s happened since the County Champs back in May? First off the County’s went well as to be expected, I did finish last but I was expecting that, but the time was were I thought I was at this stage in training (20.23) but I felt strong coming through the race. After this I had planned a good solid block of training of 5 weeks before my next race, mileage was around the 40-45 miles mark in this period, with a good mixture of easy long runs, which had a twist in them sometimes like negative splits, where I’d try and run the second half of the run quicker than the first. A mixture of grass and track sessions, gotta admit I do like doing grass reps on my local park early on a Sunday morning, nice and quiet ( apart from the odd dog walker ) 😆

The weather was definitely improving from my last blog, warming up nicely, but this was proving to be a bit of a challenge, over the last few weeks the heat has been quite intense. But before going into that, my preparation for my next race , the Masters Grand Prix and I was racing the 3000m , I was definitely feeling sharp in training and couldn’t wait to race. Had an email a few days before the race to tell us to make sure we wore our GB Masters kit to show case Masters Athletics, awesome 👍🏻

My race was first on the track , and during warm up I noticed the wind was picking up around the first bend up to the 300m mark, luckily tho didn’t notice this while racing. The race was off and I quickly got to race pace and settled myself down into 4 th place, the 3 guys in front picked up the pace and I did try and go with it but didn’t have the pace in my legs , so found myself in no mans lands and working the last laps on my own. Did finish in 4th in a time of 11:32.

Always a privilege to put on the GB Masters vest .

Now when I mentioned about the heat early , temperatures soon rose , I was training in heats of 24-27 degrees 😓 , we can’t complain, but in this heat it sure does play mind games when training!! God there has been many a time over these past 2 weeks I wanted to just not train , and even when training I started questioning, what was I doing this for!? I should stop! Etc etc, now at first I just got on with it , training was going well and I was hitting target paces, so i pushed trough. I got selected to run the Masters Inter Area Champs for the Eastern Masters. In this period I should mention that I had the builders round the house, work was stressful and I found out that was gonna become a dad again 😊😊😁, in the final few days building up to the race, things were getting on top of me, training was becoming hard work, many through pressure building up, but again times and pacing was telling me different 🤔 but 2 days before the race I had to pull out, I felt so stressed out , the heat was becoming unbearable to train in, I had to make a decision about the race, I called my coach Gary , I needed some to vent to, had to explain how I felt and how things were getting to me, it left me feeling very with drawn and having no desire to race at all. So I pulled out, which I know was the right decision. Saturday morning came along and I thought it’d be fun to do a Parkrun, no pressure, and I could run as fast as I wanted to. And used it as part of my 10k training, Grimsby 10k in 2 weeks 👍🏻 hopefully a good performance will be due..