Keith: August 12th - August 18th

"it ain’t how hard you hit; it’s about how hard you can get hit, and keep moving forward." - Rocky in Rocky Balboa.

I'll save the full quote for another time :-)

This though, pretty much sums up things currently. A week that started promisingly with Monday's long run feeling incredibly fluid and comfortable ended poorly.

A couple of longer periods driving on Friday meant I felt too stiff to do my planned evening session, so I opted to leave it until Saturday, when, as it turned out I was still too stiff. By Sunday morning, my left ankle was too swollen to put my shoe on properly.

So, really, it's another 'hit' to my training, but...... I am still moving forward as I believe I may be finding an answer to some of the increasingly frequent little issues I've had over the last year+ - see this other blog for details (http://russells-vs-amsterdam.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/keith-managing-my-back-problems-and.html).

As for the training itself.


Monday: 24.14m with 18m @ 6:21 per mile.
Tuesday: am: 12.44m easy.
pm: 8.16m easy.
Wednesday: 15.3m with 20 x 1 min fast/1 min easy (average 5:16/7:26).
Thursday: am: 10.92m easy
pm: 11.15m easy.
Friday: am: 6.17m jog.
Saturday: off.
Sunday: off.

Total: 88.28m

So to take the positives from the week........ Well it was actually a marginal increase on the previous week's mileage, plus I did have one good big workout (long tempo), and I was quite pleased with the pace for effort on the fast minutes on Wednesday's light workout.

The most positive aspect though is the contents of the blog linked above. If this is truly the cause of my problems then I should hopefully see improvements over the coming months, though, apparently, it will take 6-12 months for all the symptoms/related problems to disappear.

With 9 weeks to go to Amsterdam, my attention has turned to working out a change in the structure of my training that will make for a more even load and hopefully allow me to be consistent week on week. It was only about a month ago that I felt I was in pretty close to sub-2:30 marathon shape so hopefully if I can get my training right over the coming weeks I can at least get back into that kind of shape by Amsterdam.

It will be require me to walk a fine line though to get in the appropriate training whilst keeping my body in the game. I shall blog some more on my thoughts on this with next week's training.