Squeeze The Lactate

When you're employed and squeezing in workouts before breakfast or after you've commuted home you're less likely to notice their varying quality, or at least you are more inclined to blame the boss for your shitty workout. I don't have that excuse and although I continue to blame the wind there is more to it than that.

I've noticed that every few weeks I have a week of sub par training. Nothing too terrible but a week where the effort seems too great and the reward too little (see also: housework, work, dealing with government agencies and life in general). The good thing is that this is usually followed by a period of increased fitness. Last week was the former, running 62 miles but ending with a jaw-droppingly poor long run at pensioner pace. This week I'm experiencing the latter with a 5 mile tempo at 6:00 pace (hilly, windy) on tuesday and an encouraging 10k pace session today. This, no doubt, is the train, recover, compensate cycle that often goes unnoticed.

The 10k pace session is a new (to me) form of lactate threshold (this has nothing to do with pregnant women!) training recommended by the coach Antonio Cabral. Fast twitch runners (of which I am most certainly one) often struggle with long continuous tempo runs. His recommendation is to split it into 10k pace 400m repeats followed by 100m recoveries jogged in 45 seconds - to be run continuously. Must admit it worked pretty well today as I comfortably managed 5 miles of 10k pace running hitting all the paces for repeats and recovery.

Unfortunately my chronic stitch has decided to make an unwelcome reappearance. Any quality run further than 3 miles seems to bring it on and it can be totally crippling. I've tried everything to shift it including strange aural and visual solutions - all of which seem pointless as well as embarrassing. So, for the time being I will continue to ignore it and hope it will disappear - it seems to work with beggars, politicians and double glazing salesman.