Holidays In The Sun/Stamina In The UK

There's a lot gone on since I last updated this blog. For one thing, I've been on holiday. Generally, I'm not a huge fan of running on holiday. It's either too hot or too hilly. Or in the case of one vacation in Portugal a couple of years back when I thought I was going to pass out on the run back, both. The last time I was out of the country for any length of time was the fortnight I spent in Goa back in January, which was a particular challenge. You could only really run if you got up at dawn and headed straight out, or timed it just as the sun was dipping down below the horizon. Then you had a choice of a strength-sapping slog across sandy beaches or, if you tried the roads, a dangerous dodgem course round vagrant cows, flea-bitten dogs and the ubiquitous tuk-tuks. 

Lloret de Mar "stadium"

So I was expecting the worst, running-wise, when we took the kids to Lloret de Mar on the Costa Brava - but I couldn't have been more wrong. Right outside our apartment was a municipal running track, in a rather ramshackle little stadium, open pretty much all day and completely free to use. Its main customers appeared to be groups of elderly Catalans performing mid-morning exercise walks on the outer lanes, which meant I pretty much had the inside lanes to myself.
Some of my running friends tell me they hate doing laps of a track - too boring, no scenery and so on. Me, I love it because you're only ever 400 metres away from being able to tick off  another "segment" of the run. Also I love the bounce of the track under your feet - such a relief after the hard pounding your soles get from pavements and concrete paths. True, age and overuse had taken much of the bounce out of this particular track (a feeling I'm sure many of us can sympathise with), but even so, it was an unexpected delight.
I did mention in my last entry to this blog that I'd been upping my distances recently. So one morning in Lloret, I managed an epic 30 laps of the track (12k, or 11.95k according to my fussy and overly pedantic Garmin GPS). And that's just the start. Since returning to the UK, I managed this effort which I'm rather proud of:

It seems I've finally got my stamina back. Which is useful for a would-be marathon runner really. I've slowly been pushing the distances up, and am hoping to hit 13 miles plus by the end of the month (16k is about 10 miles for those without an imperial/metric converter to hand). 

So how did this happen? Well, I tried a lot of things but in the end it came down to stopping caring about pace. I gave up worrying about how fast (or to be more honest, slow) I was running, stopped berating myself if I was a couple of minutes slower over 10k, say, than the time before, and concentrated on enjoying my runs. Well, not enjoying exactly, but going at a pace where I wasn't exhausting myself too early. 

I start with a nice easy lope for the first few kilometres. If I feel I'm beginning to go at a pace which is seeping too much energy, I deliberately rein myself in. So by the time I'm in the last third, say, of my run, it doesn't feel like purgatory to continue.

And weirdly, not only did my stamina magically return, but after a bit, so did my pace. I'm now hitting times that are at or pretty close to my best, even with the first part of the run being at a slower pace than I was doing before.

There is a theory I've read that might help explain it, which says that at slower speeds your body burns fat rather than sugar, so that short-term energy stores remain relatively undepleted, and so by deliberately training at a slower speed for longer, you can "coach" your body to burn fat rather than sugar for longer. God knows whether it's true or not, but it did make a kind of sense.

Anyway, onwards and upwards. Huge month for me - I have two races to look forward to. One is the Adidas 10k in Shoreditch on Sunday,

at which I'd like to run under 55 minutes; but the big test is at the end of October, when I run the River Thames half-marathon - my first 13-miler for a couple of years. Training times would suggest I might be heading for about 2 hours, assuming I actually finish. I've still got a little way to go distance-wise before I'm entirely confident I'll be able to. I'll keep you posted.