Peak Week Strain - Oxford Half Marathon Training Diary - Week 7

Posted on: 24 September 2024

This post is part of a 10-part series charting my training block for the Oxford Half Marathon 2024.

16th September - 22nd September

  • Total volume: 86.3km (4.2k football)
  • Longest run: 23km
  • Average resting & max HR: 39 / 159
  • Average bed time: 23:00
  • Easy / hard split: 76/24
  • Tanda marathon race predictor: 3:09:52 (đź”˝ 00:01:24)
  • Training VDOT: 53.9

Oxford week 7 plan

Monday

Like most Mondays, I got a 7k (7.55k in the end) recovery run in in the middle of the day. A bit more elevation than usual to mix it up.

Football was quite a relaxed effort in the evening. An average heart rate of 132 was 10bpm slower than the week before. Strava Relative Effort clocked in at 34. A useful lower effort ahead of a big week of training.

Tuesday

Tuesday was also a very typical post-recovery trudge. Such is the monotony deep into a training block. I never have much energy on a Tuesday; it’s more about time on feet. I try to vary up the route to keep it interesting. I ended up hitting a pretty good pace in the end: 4:55/km over 12km. HR in the high 130s.

Wednesday

Wednesday was my first double of the block. I had a Fartlek planned for the morning, followed by an easy run in the evening to get me up to 20km for the day. I didn’t feel particularly energised going into the Fartlek run Wednesday morning, but as the session progressed I felt stronger. It ended up being a really good workout, with segment PBs aplenty. A really good threshold and VO2max combination workout. 5 x 3 minutes threshold, 1 minute rest, 1 minute hard, 1 minute rest. It totalled 11km at an average pace of 4:33/km.

I made the grave error of eating dinner before my evening run; something that never works out well for me. On paper it was an easy 9km to see out the day, but it turned into a gruelling 7km that I eventually had to bail out of early. A disappointing end to the day, and 2km down from my planned volume for the week. But an important lesson learned.

Thursday

Thursday was a much needed rest day. According to my Garmin watch, I’ve been gradually accumulating stress that I can’t seem to recover enough from before the next workout.

For some bizarre reason, I decided to do a cycle on this day. I’m not that used to cycling efficiently at the moment, and this turned into a rather rushed 27k ride in my lunch break. Not really the rest my body was after.

I also bouldered in the evening, which was a good all-body workout.

Friday

Friday featured my 3rd mistake for the week! I did some pretty full-on weight lifting in the morning including squats and deadlifts. Thinking nothing of it, I set out on an easy run a few hours later. 13km on the plan. It was hard. This time, I managed to hit the prescribed distance, but the entire run felt like the fatigued state at the end of a long race. Legs felt very heavy and it was not an enjoyable run.

Saturday

Saturday, until recently, was going to be a 10k easy run. But I had the opportunity to get a new Parkrun location in and I couldn’t pass it up. I travelled with my family to Malling Rec in Lewes, a new Parkrun that started up in July. I’d planned to run this as a tempo effort, around target half marathon pace.

However, I got into a friendly battle for 5th place for most of the race. In addition, the GPS was off on the course due to a sizeable portion of the route being under tree cover. This meant I ended up going a fair bit faster than planned. A 19:38 to be exact. I got a decent cool down jog in afterwards to get my volume for the day up to 8.5 (slightly short again). I felt OK, pleased with the effort, but as we know with hard efforts, the damage done might not rear its head until later.

Sunday

Enter: Sunday. The “peak workout” of the block. A long run with sizeable chunks of goal pace running. I’d done more overall volume at target pace in a run previously, but not over as long a distance as this. I’d also, somewhat ambitiously, chosen not to do this workout as flat loops of Jobs Lane.

I’d practiced a bit of carb loading going into this run and wanted to try as much race-specific gear and routine as possible. I set out right around the time Oxford Half kicks off, in my Saucony Endorphin Pros and race kit, complete with gels and water.

The plan was 5km easy, 5km @ HMP, 3km float (somewhere between easy and HMP), 5km @ HMP, 5km easy. I completed the first 5km at quicker than easy pace, averaging 4:41/km. I was feeling good. The Goal pace section kicked in and I was cruising pretty well, admittedly overall downhill for the first km. And then it got hard. The first proper hill, and my pace slowed from 4:05/km to 4:12/km for my second km. The 3rd and 4th was very similar, and I pulled a bit back in the 5th with a 4:08/km. This was going to be tough.

I later realised, with the clarity of Strava’s “grade adjusted pace”, that I was probably going over goal effort on those middle splits. The elevation was not trivial, and my legs were really starting to feel the fatigue of the Parkrun the day before.

I focused on recovering as much as I could in the 3km float. I averaged 4:40/km, a bit slower than I’d hoped, but this did include a muddy, walking, off-road 100m towards the end of the set. Running around 4:30/km (around my Marathon pace) felt sustainable. But I braced myself for the next 5km set at around 4:07/km.

This was just as hard as the first, with undulating lanes and quickly tiring legs. It took some mental grit to get through this and try to maintain pace. This set averaged 4:12/km, but the grade-adjusted pace was closer to goal pace at 4:09/km. I ground through the final 5km, but I felt completely spent. I averaged 4:29 over 23km, some achievement when I stand back and analyse. My 3 last long runs have progressed from 23km @ 4:48/km, 25km @4:43/km & 23km @ 4:29/km.

Despite the immediate feeling of disappointment from struggling so much, with the fatigue of the week in my legs, this workout was objectively a very good one for fitness. Do I wish I hadn't done a hard 5k effort the day before? Yes. But I'll learn a lesson from it.

It’s hard to read into how accurate a predictor it is for the race, due to the numerous differing variables: Fatigue, elevation, conditions. I think it’s one to bank and ultimately reflect positively on. I ran my 3rd fastest half marathon, solo, on a hilly course, without a hint of tapering.

Overall

A few kilometres missed here and there meant I only just hit a new volume record of 82.2km (81.9km the week before). This was the true “grit” week of the training. I had to dig in so many times and this is what training is all about.

I plan to back off next week and front-load my week with a rest day to try to get some much-needed recovery in.

My Tanda marathon prediction took another big drop in the right direction, dipping under 3:10 for the first time ever.

I bouldered, and got just the 1 strength session in this week.

Tags: running health sleep