Keith: 29th April - 5th May

Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe - Abraham Lincoln

My current situation can basically be summed up as: ~3-4kg (1/2st for the imperially minded) over race weight and not feeling terribly fit, but I expect that with the improvements with my back it is only a matter of time before things being improve (hopefully rapidly).

Monday: am: 5.6m with 6 x diagonal strides.
pm: 4m warm-up, 15 x {2min fast / 1min jog} - LT grass session, ~6m cool-down - 17.09m total
Tuesday: am: 8.16m easy
pm: 15.05m easy
Wednesday: Long run - 5m easy, 10m @ 6:25m/m, 5.07m steady (6:58m/m) - 20.07m total
pm: osteopath session.
Thursday: am: 7.15m jog
pm: 5.09m jog
Friday: - off; swapped my usual rest day from Saturday because of reactions following the osteopath session as my body settled down after the work carried out on it.
Saturday: 2.7m warm-up, 6 x {5min fast / 2min jog} - LT road session, 2.8m cool-down with 6 x {15s stride / 30s jog} - 12.04m total
Sunday: 12.17m easy

Total: 102.42m

The average pace for the 15 x 2mins fast on Monday was 5:43 per mile with the effort probably somewhere around 10m race effort, though I could still feel a lack of power in the legs (albeit less of an issue than the last time I tried to run quicker).

The faster 10m during Wednesday's long run was at an effort that is always a good indicator of current Marathon Pace + 20-30s. I started to feel reasonably fluid during this run, so hopefully a sign of things improving.

Saturday's session went considerably better than expected. The plan was to start the 5min efforts at maybe a little more than Marathon effort and take it from there. About half-way through the efforts I suddenly seemed to be picking up speed/power for no real increase in effort.
Paces for the efforts came in at: 5:52 / 5:47 / 5:42 / 5:48 (uphill finish) / 5:37 / 5:30 (downhill finish).

Sunday morning gave me an answer as to why the pace picked up during the session as my glutes and the tops of my hamstrings were both quite tender. I suspect the back problems were preventing my glutes from 'firing' and this was what I equated to a lack of power. Now they have begun to fire again, but are out of practice. This is something I shall have to be careful with over the next few weeks.

So, all in all, a decent week, yet with plenty of scope for improvement going forward. If I can carry on from here I should have a very sharp axe by the time I come to do the marathon specific work.