2011 - progress so far

It's been a while since I've posted anything - I was too busy over Christmas playing with Lego and Scalextric, and since then I've been back at work and that takes up too much time. It's a New Year now and I've officially started training for the WHW race. There has been one revolutionary change to my training for this year, which is my training week running from Saturday to Friday now, rather than Monday to Sunday as in previous years. It is a subtle but important change that will hopefully mean I will no longer spend weekends trying to decide between making up my weekly mileage or spending time with the kids.

As you may or may not remember, my training plan is more about trying to do a balance of different types of run each week rather than having a strict plan of what run I want to do on each individual day. My key objectives each week are to do either one 4+ hour run or 2 x 2+ hour runs on consecutive days, do a hilly run with at least 400m of ascent, do some sort of interval training, and do some cross training.

So for week 1 of 2011, this is what I did:

Long run/runs - I did a 20 mile, 4 hour run from the house, mainly over boggy moorland and with about 900m ascent, hence the rather pedestrian 5 mph pace. This was a great run as I managed to do two things I have been meaning to do for ages. First was to recce part of a 35-ish mile route that I have been thinking about for a while (and which I'll hopefully run sometime in the next month or so), and second was to check out what appears to be a path that slants up through the northern escarpment of the Gargunnock Hills just south of Kippen (Standmilane Crag to be precise). The path was quite an exciting way on to the top of the moor, though it was difficult to get to so I expect it will be while before I go that way again. The route took me over the top of the wonderfully named Carleatheran (gaelic for "tip-toe over frozen bog") which is always a pleasure. Here's a couple of pics from the route:

The frozen Touch Reservoirs, Stirling and the Ochils - I love the views from these hills

On Standmilane Crag - can you spot the path I had come all this way to see? No, me neither, but it is there somewhere.

Hilly run - at 10am on the 1st of January I was standing next to a trig point, altitude 485m, having run there pretty much from sea level. Tick.

Intervals - not this week...

Cross-training - we did a couple of six or seven mile walks during the week, so I reckon they count.

So my weekly mileage was 37 miles, and on top of that I'd walked about a further 13 miles, which I was happy enough with, and I had enjoyed almost every one of them.