Week 8: Thursday - 15km progressive (rolling)

Change of plan

SO MUCH STARING AT WEATHER FORECASTS AND THE CALENDAR.

After all the hooha about changing my long run day to be Saturday, with associated comical calendar errors in the Runna app, I’ve ended up running 15km on a Thursday. Why is that? Well, Saturday’s weather forecast is for torrential rain and 50mph winds. Whereas this morning it was freezing bastard cold, but very little wind and clear skies meaning it was light as early as it could possibly be.

I’m an early riser. I’ve got warm running clothes. I’ve got hats and gloves. And most importantly, I couldn’t bear the thought of not doing the long run this week – especially because next week is deload, so skipping 15km would have meant a 3 week gap between 14km and 16km. Nasty. So, let’s have it.

15km progressive (rolling)

The ask

This is what Runna wanted:

3.5km conversational
3.5km @ 5:35/km
3.5km @ 5:20/km
3.5km @ 5:10/km
1km conversational

But wait, there’s more! Click on the i-in-a-circle next to the word rolling, and up comes this:

Rolling Long Run

For your 15km long run today, we suggest you aim for 75m to 150m of elevation gain. This matches the rolling elevation profile of your race.

Right, OK, so you want the longest run yet, getting progressively faster to a pretty punchy pace, and hills? Sure, of course, no problem, you’ve absolutely got me in shape for that. Except, well, no you haven’t.

But wait, there’s more more! A box which says I should NOT use paces:

rpe

And despite my reservations about RPE, if I switch that on the requirements change to:

3.5km conversational
3.5km @ RPE 5
3.5km @ RPE 6
3.5km @ RPE 6 (slightly faster)
1km conversational

Eyes rolled so damn hard at the “slightly faster” version of 6. Sigh. Anyway, I did switch it to RPE, in the hope that Runna would then just not care that I’m going to run 15km at whatever pace feels comfortable. Might not be as slow as conersational, but might be, who knows? But not RPE 5, 6, and 6-but-faster. At the start of the plan I couldn’t perceive exertion outside of “easy”, “solid” and “make it stop”, and 8 weeks in I still can’t.

The outcome

I ran 15km averaging 6:07/km. Paces were all over the show, ranging from a 5:50 to a 6:19 (and in fact those were back to back).

When the light was at its dimmest I was a bit tenative in case the pavements were slippery; I also took more care than usual on the parts of park or trail which were completely covered in leaves, worrying about mud, slipperiness, and still recalling that on Saturday I fell over.

I stopped for traffic. I stopped because three dogs ran at me, barking loudly, much to the embarrasment of their owner.

Hey! Stop that! This gentleman is allowed to be running!

I stopped to take my gloves off. I stopped to open my carb fuel thing. I stopped to pick up the nasal spray thing which fell out of my pocket. And at no time did I care that I was stopping. I repeat: I just went out to run 15km at whatever pace I felt like, not progressive, and not rolling.

On that last point: I did add some hills to the early kilometres, but not spectacular ones, and I hated them – so from about halfway I just ran on the largely-flat.

Runna doesn’t sync with my entire running history, so thinks I’m great. Crushing it, in fact.

crushing

The results

Well Smashrun liked it.

notables

Mind you, “fastest 15k ever” is easy when you’ve only done the distance once before.

As for Runna, well…

Rolling ✅ – much to my suprise, it turns out I did 76m of elevation gain, just sneaking inside the lower bound of the range Runna wanted.
Progressive: ✅ – ha! So I switched to RPE but go back to look at the paces of the 3x 3.5km segments and lo and behold: 6:12, 6:08 and 6:03. I sped up, on average, by about 5s/km for the bits. That’s progressive! And what’s more, by the end I had indeed entered full on “make it stop” mode, albeit more psychologically than physically.

Walked to the shop and bought a fizzy drink. Don’t I look pleased with everything.

finished

Went back home, showered, got ready for work. Took a while to decide what shirt to wear for my calls today.

sucks