In my previous blog, I mentioned I had earmarked this last week as my hardest weeks training for Toronto, and that I had decided to use a weeks holiday from work so I could allow myself the rest and recovery.

I thought I'd use this weeks blog to give some of my thoughts on what it was like living like a full time athlete for a week!

Being able to take a sleep during the day was one of the things I expected to help a lot.  I found it's important to time it right.  I took a nap on Tuesday far too late in the day, woke up 30mins before our track session and found I felt a bit lethargic on the session!  In the long term I think the sleep helped a lot.

One thing I hadn't thought about too much was having more time to cook and prepare better quality meals.  We went to the supermarket on Monday and stocked up on loads of fruit and veg.  I made three fruit salads throughout the week which were a great way of getting plenty of vitamin C back in the body and contributing to your "five a day".

Being able to train with other people all week was a huge help.  I'm so used to doing everything on my own, having John as a guest in the house and showing him some of my favourite routes passed the time quickly.  John was really impressed with the running and reminded me how lucky we are to have fantastic trails, parks, and a variety of training groups we can link in with.

It's amazing how the days just go.  I half expected to end up bored as a full time athlete for a week but I was still cramming plenty into my days.  It made me realise how well organised I am to fit my training and everything else in normally.

If you've seen the training diary for the week, you'll see the week was really productive.  On Tuesday I did 16x400m off 30secs just to get the legs moving a bit quicker, but the short recovery made it a productive workout.  It was a tired session after a gruelling 10,000m race.

The other two key workouts of the week were more marathon specific.  I did another 10 mile progressive tempo on Thursday starting at 6:19 for the first mile, and finishing on 55:32.  The last 6 miles were in 31:45 and given the muddy trail we did this on, I was really pleased with this one.  I felt totally different to Tuesday - now fully recovered - and feeling like I was easing through the gears which was just what I wanted, it's the first time I've felt really fit in this build up.

The final workout of the week was a 24 mile run with a very hilly half marathon in Leek thrown in the middle.  The idea of this was to get some sustained effort work in.  There were flatter much faster options but these involved travelling down south and for what was essentially part of a training run, there really wasn't much point.  The hills if anything made me work extra hard and were the best form of strength training I could have had.  I won the race by almost a minute and felt I got out of it exactly what I was looking for.  It rounded off a 121 mile week so the legs will have been pretty tired!

One final decent week coming up now, then it's an easier week for Bristol Half Marathon.  And then it's only 3 weeks to go!  It's coming around fast and I'm starting to get a real buzz about it now.  This build up is going so much better than the London build up did, I just hope I can do what i did in April and get the best out of myself on the day for where I am at.

Keep training hard

Cheers,
Dave