A tale of two running journeys

Running journeys are unique and very much like rollercoasters! That said, we are all runners trying to be the best we can be. Sometimes we need help, be that the physiological numbers from a Lactate Threshold Test or a running buddy by your side. At Blizard Run Club we are here to help!

Get yourself a cuppa, put up your feet and read how we have helped 2 of our members along their running journeys.

First up is Tom Shaw a Worksop Harrier and committed local athlete looking to edge that little bit closer to sub 2:30 for a marathon. This is his race report from the Elite Marathon at Wrexham.

Having run eleven marathons prior to this one I’ve tried a few different ways of training in to them and think I have a pretty decent understanding of what I need to do to tweak my ‘raw’ fitness in to getting the most out of it over the 26.2 miles, culminating in my previous PB of 2:35:57 at London Marathon in October 2021. Going in to Wrexham in April this year was a bit different in that I didn’t really train for it all! That’s not to say I didn’t train for it by any means, but more of there was no focus on ‘the marathon takes precedent over all else’.

Following London I sat down with Dave for a general chat in October about how I was training, what I could tweak and change and how I could progress further, as it certainly feels like gains are harder to come by as you get quicker. Dave pointed out that I wasn’t doing a lot wrong as it was, but you don’t know what you don’t know, so getting an expert to look in can certainly help course correct in the right direction! Just a couple small tweaks in training saw me PB at Telford 10k in December and then I had a LT test with Dave in December, where Dave also encouraged me to attend the Wednesday and Saturday Blizard sessions when I could. Knowing the quality of the athletes that attend the sessions as and when can and mixed in the sessions to my training when I could not.

Normally, April Marathon training for me would start about the New Year, building from 75 miles to about 90 peak with plenty of MP work mixed in amongst the other harder sets and easy running. This year has just been about building general run fitness with no focus on specific events. A steady weekly mileage of around 65 miles with two sessions of Tempo & Threshold a week, with the occasional bit of Threshold work when Dave has given me a nudge in the right direction has seen PB at 5k and 20 miles, a big course PB at Retford Half (nearly matching my PB on a tougher course) and represent Nottinghamshire in the Inter-counties XC at Prestwold Hall.

Going in to Sunday wasn’t so much ‘this is the pinnacle of what I have trained for’ as an experiment of what could I do off just good run fitness. In the build-up, I’d only run 20 miles three times, and only one at pace, at the Ashby 20 where I just ran to HR and saw what I got (1:57:06) with the rest of my long runs being around 15 miles, but with my decent weekly mileage and knowing what I did at Ashby 20, the full 26.2 wasn’t too daunting.

I entered Wrexham Elite after seeing the success of their 2021 event. From a field of 156, 49 ran 2:30:00 or faster which makes it a pretty stacked field. Seven Laps of an industrial estate in Wrexham probably won’t be on most people’s bucket list, but in truth it wasn’t that bad (I think!). Exactly 7 laps, with a 3.5 lap half marathon option out of the industrial estate, a couple of gentle rolling rural roads (approx. 20 m elevation gain per lap) and back past the fun named strava segment ‘Special K Sprint’ past the Kellogg’s Factory meant it was easy to keep track of pacing with a clock at both each lap and half way at the HM finish line. It also meant nutrition was easy to manage with my wife Emma doing an excellent crewing job tossing me a gel once each lap (and something nice to look forward to in the later laps). Even the weather was kind with sunny but cool conditions only slightly spoiled by a bit too much of a breeze.

I used the same strategy I had at Ashby oh going by HR and knowing it would very closely align to what I could actually sustain and soon settled in to a Rhythm where found a great little group that mostly composed of Half-Marathons running a similar pace and managed a nice consistency on the first four laps with laps 2-4 being 21:51-21:57, and I went through half way in 1:16:08, near-as-damn-it to my top of LT prediction. The unfortunate side to running with the HM’ers was that at half time, it suddenly got a lot quieter. Of the 156 starters, 79 were done at the HM finish line. A good group of four of soon formed up to carry on the 2:32-2:33-ish pace which worked well through the next 1.5 laps. About half-way in to lap four I was certainly feeling the limits of my own fitness as the lack of marathon-pace specific work started to tell, but I’d expected that, and with the time already banked I was still good for a PB if I stopped short of completely detonating. Speaking of which, our small group did of sorts at the start of lap 5, as one guy pulled away strongly, and two blew up (one heading for a DNF) leaving me on my own for a bit of a slog for the final two laps. What had felt like that wonderful ‘comfortably-quick’ effort of marathon pace was now feeling like a really hard-effort jogging pace, though in reality it felt worse than it was as I’d dropped about 6s/km. The last two laps were pretty lonely; the field definitely wasn’t as stacked this year with just 57 finishers, and with 20 DNF’s it had quite a high attrition rate but my thoughts were just on damage limitation each lap and knowing I could still get a PB if I didn’t give in.

The result was a 2:34:14, a PB of 1:43 (and a bigger PB than from my 2:37:02 at Berlin 2019 to 2:35:57 at London 2021). I was pretty pleased with this as I lay in a grassy verge at the end, Emma again looking at me wondering why we do it all for a couple of minutes, and the race photography taking advantage of my sorry-state. Had I spent the start of the year training for the Marathon, would I have dropped a couple of minutes in the second half? Probably not, but then I definitely wouldn’t have got to half way as quick so wouldn’t have already had the time to spare. Given another 8 weeks or so I’d be very confident I could have turned that positive split in to a much more even-split, but spending the year so far powering up the engine before tuning it for marathons has definitely been the right approach, and with a date in London in October, I’m excited to keep training with the Blizard gang to see how much faster I can push that engine (faster than 1:16 to half way) before tuning in for a finish sprint down The Mall!

Cheers Dave and the Blizard gang. 

Next up is "Our Kim"