Week 8: Saturday - Hill repeats
Everything is wrong
Absolutely poleaxed by something largely inconsequential and unimportant at work late on Friday afternoon. Took me directly to a shitty place mentally, for no logical reason, but I entered a zone where I can only see the negatives in everything. Compounded with a terrible night’s sleep including nightmares, which I only have when depressed and are always of the psychologically awful kind, and waking up to see that the weather forecast had been accurate. Pissing rain, and Storm Bert was blowing a gale.
Best get out and run uphill then eh.
Hill repeats
Runna wanted:
- 1.6km conversational warm up
- top that up as required to reach base of hill
- 12 times:
- 60s running hard uphill
- 30s walking rest
- easy jog back to base of hill
- 1.6km conversational warm down
Given the forecast was for gusty wind up to 50mph, on Friday I’d spent ages contemplating what hill to use. The one I’ve used for previous hill workouts is farmland, and I suspected that after recent rain it might now be muddy underfoot. So I sort of evaluated two long uphill streets instead, pretty much deciding “run from Jewson up past the old folks home”.
Come Saturday morning, I changed my mind completely. The wind was so bad I figured the corn fields would provide better protection from the wind, not actually thinking that the farmer might have chopped it all down so it’s actually far more exposed than anywhere else. Oh.
Never mind. The absence of the corn corridor means far less perceptible lines of perspective, making the hill look much less steep.
And the harvesting meant underfoot was … well, a mix. It was muddy, which I had feared, but on top of the mud was a carpet of corn which kinda made it OK again. Regardless, I had no appetite for running elsewhere to find a different hill, so cornfields it was.
Hell repeats
First rep was strong. Got almost to the perpendicular path. My Inov8 jacket was doing a reasonable job at protecting me from the elements, and I was listening to music rather than speech and that made for a nice change.
LOTS of dog walkers about. Mercifully I only had to contend with them and their hounds at the bottom, prior to the uphill efforts. That was until the 12th rep, when finally someone was heading down my section so I had to improvise. By then I was happy for the longer rest period anyway.
Really had to play a lot of tricks with my head to make this bearable. Like, telling myself that the 4th rep was a leap from 25% complete to 33% complete, which sounds significant. Getting past half way another boundary, and then doing the same thing which how much I had left.
At one point, I dunno, about rep 5 or so, I had to shout at myself:
You’re not meant to enjoy this. You’re meant to benefit.
Let’s hope so. A couple reps later I was like, good lord, this is murder – at which point a literal murder of crows turned up to mock me.
My feet slipped a couple of times, only ever at the start of the uphills – until I was going past a walker during the warm down and I almost went completely over. Almost.
Once the whole thing was over I took my coat’s hood down, and realised just how good a job it had been doing protecting me from the wind. Blimey. This workout was also the time when I learned that this coat, which I bought over a year ago, does actually have a pocket. I’ve spent 12-13 months convinced it didn’t have one.
That weather had been horrid:
Albeit Mike had it even worse over at Basingstoke parkrun.
I had hoped this run would cheer me up. Endorphins, pride for my diligence and perseverance at sticking to the plan, or for getting out at all given the conditions – but nope. I felt miserable at the start, during it, and afterwards. Didn’t really cheer up until I was a few beers in before football, a game that we then lost. Great.
Silver linings
I’m typing this all out the day after. Feeling a bit better, especially with a Sunday roast on the imminent horizon. Bert is still windy as fuck, but I’ve looked at the coming week’s workouts – it’s a deload week – and hopefully it won’t be so bad.
I’ve also looked back at Strava (while my subscription is still alive) on the website, rather than the app, meaning I could check the GAP on some of the shitty bits of the past week. Turns out the 4:50 km I could only manage at 5:13 on Tuesday was… 4:50 grade assisted. And the repeats I’ve just been writing about, well grade assisted a few of them are sub-4:00/km. Huh. Perhaps this week wasn’t as bad in my legs as it was in my head.