Week 9 of my half marathon plan with Garmin Coach was hot and sweaty. I live in the Netherlands which reached record breaking high temperatures this past week going up to around 40°C for three days straight. I run in the early mornings, but they were a lot warmer as usual as well! I’m kind of relieved I agreed with my physical therapist that I would be running maximum 8 km per run and only three days a week instead of my usual four workouts a week. Still no speed work either. This is all meant to ease the pain in my foot and hopefully ensure I can start fully training again soon. With only 11 weeks to go and many training runs that are not going according to my expectations (or my virtual coach’s), I’m slowly getting nervous about finishing my half marathon.
Training 28 – Tired run
Training 29 – Cadence drills
Training 30 – Easy run
Friday morning and I’m out by 6:00 again. After three days of approximately 40°C temperatures inside my house have reached about 30°C and at 6:00 in the morning it was only slightly cooler outside: 26°C. This will be fun. I brought a 0,5L soft-flask water with me in my Flipbelt and decided to just see what will be possible today. I ran/walked the trails, stopped to watch the sunrise and I finally got a decent picture of a deer. Looking at the picture now, there were even two of them!
Training 31 – Negative splits
After last week’s failed negative split run, Coach Amy was giving me another chance. I’m not entirely sure what she wanted me to run and unfortunately, it’s not possible to review your workout steps after you’ve completed the workout. At least, not if you didn’t fully complete it. Especially with the workouts with goal paces it would be nice to be able to see the pace range you should’ve been aiming for as well as the different intervals.
This week’s negative split run was supposed to be shorter as last week which was 14,5 km. I think this week’s run was meant to be a little below 10 km, but this would be going against the advice of my physical therapist. I decided to do a round of about 7-8 km.
After this week’s insane heat wave, the weekend has been full of rain, thunderstorms and cooler, very welcome cooler temperatures. When I went out for my run it was about 19°C and raining lightly. I love running in the rain and was really looking forward to a nice and cool run. It was wet, is was muddy and it was awesome. My foot was not entirely happy with this run and neither was Coach Amy. Since my round turned out to be 7,5 km and there were no negative splits to be recognized, Coach Amy told me I had “room to grow”. Well yeah, I knew that.
