Week 4: Wednesday

In the long run

AFC Wimbledon beat Morecambe 3-0 at home last night, maintaining our perfect home record in the league so far this season. 5 home games, 15 goals! Accordingly I may or may not have had one or two more drinks than was sensible… I also didn’t get home until gone midnight, and so slept a bit less than normal. I thought it might have been poor quality sleep too but my watch says it was alright. Huh. Anyway, I knew today was the shortest long run possibly of the whole training plan and was loooking forward to it.

Long run - 7km

Coach Ben says:

Your first deload week of the plan, enjoy this ’long run’ not feeling quite so long and at a manageable pace for the distance too! Keep it easy and relaxed today, you have done some big long runs so recovery is key! Have fun!

Frankly I could do without every sentence ending in an exclamation point, but hey.

It was another densely foggy morning so I threw on the vaguely hi viz thin jacket and set out. There are loads of ways to run 7km and stay fairly close to home so I figured I would likely run my normal 5k route and then go round the lake, but what happened? I’ll tell you what happened. What happened is that as I was descending the hill towards the left hand turn into the alleyway I always¹ take, I decided – on this “keep it easy and relaxed” deload run – to run right and go uphill.

Yep. I voluntarily ran up a hill during a workout that didn’t require it. It’s not like some crazily steep hill, it’s longer than it is steep, but uphill it undoubtedly is. I’m surprised at how quickly I’ve got comfortable with not looking at my watch on these “conversational pace” runs, here I wasn’t tempted to check my heart rate or pace or anything. I just ran to feel, and was honestly fucking delighted that I barely noticed any difference in how I felt. An early test for whether I’m making progress, and y’know what, I think I am.

In Godalming town centre I started off running by the river, then deviated up to the high street, then alleyways and Homebase and round the back of the business estate in Catteshall. All places I pretty much never run. Not many folk around, a few dog walkers and schookids waiting for buses. Quite a nice run tbh. There were a shitload of pigeons though, at that place where there are always shitloads of pigeons.

Temptation finally got the better of me as I reached the main road between Godalming and Guildford, and I looked at my watch. I thought I had less than a km to go but it was 1.5km, a fact which meant I could run to and around the lake. Very glad I did, as by now the sun was making a good fist of attempting to burn off the mist and things were looking very pretty indeed. Also there were hundreds of geese all honking like crazy, which I always enjoy.

Smashrun says it was my lowest average heart rate in a month, and lowest max HR in 3 months. That is definitely progress. I mean, low max HR despite adding hills! Maybe there’s something to this plan. I hope so, and in fact I kinda have to believe it, because this morning my Runna trial ran out and I’ve paid £99.99 for a full year’s subscription.

As for Strava… well. Because it’s 2024, they’ve added some bullshit “AI” features, and I don’t call it bullshit out of cynicism about AI. I call it bullshit because it’s properly bullshit. All this “intelligence” does is tell me exactly what I wrote myself, just using slightly different words or word order. What use it this? Nonsense.