Weekend Long-ish Run - 17km (slow and steady)

dannewton just finished a 17.66km run, that lasted for 117 minutes.
This run helped dannewton burn 1311.0 calories.

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Description from Strava:
It is once again the weekend (and my days off work have chuffing flown by, back to work on Monday!). Today usually would be the 'long run' of the week, but as I ran my birthday marathon 3 days ago, it would be daft to do anything close to that distance so soon.

Because of that I opted for something a little shorter today. I did still want a reasonable distance, and I've already been for a little recovery run plus a couple of walks in the last few days so I'm happy my legs are mostly recovered. I decided in the end to set a time limit, so I would run in one direction for 60 minutes, and then I would turn and run home.

After getting up later than planned this morning (mostly due to an unexpectedly late night), I eventually threw some clothes on, and laced up my shoes before heading outside. It had been raining pretty heavily earlier on, but by the time I set foot outside it appeared to have mostly stopped.

There was more rain forecast, so I decided to put a thin rain jacket on as well, which turned out to be a slight error on my part as there was no more rain, and it was also slightly warmer than expected. I would've been fine in a tshirt once I had warmed up... but never mind lol

I stuck to the path alongside the bypass just to keep it simple, and it was a pretty pleasant run out. I was of course mostly sticking to zone 2 (and I managed to keep it there apart from a couple of hills which are on the route).

As the route is so straight forward, I found my mind drifting of and thinking of other things, and before I knew it I had been on the move for almost a hour...

...and so it was then time to slowly bimble back home. It was slow and easy, and thats precisely what I needed today.

Regular readers will no doubt beaware of the Zone 2 heart rate stuff that I've been banging on about for the past 4 months. Its all relatig to the principle that most of my training runs should be slow and easy, and this in turn means I can run further, for longer. Compared to where my firness levels were back in March, I'm now running 50% further than I was, and actually have more energy than I did back then.

I owe all of that to slowing down the pace by the way...

It leads nicely onto the below book, which I received for my birthday

80/20 Running by Matt Fitzgerald Link to Amazon

The basic premise behind the book is that runners should allocate 80% of the distance or time spent running to slow easy efforts, and then just 20% of the time should be spent on intermediate/hard efforts

It does sound counter-intuitive, but there is an increasing acceptance of the idea that lots of easy running, along with some well placed speedwork, will lead to an improvement in performance

Now of course, I've already spent a reasonable amount of time getting used to running slowly, and building a decent aerobic base.

I've just run 2 marathons in the space of 10 days, with no noticeable after effects, I think I've got a reasonably good aerobic base now!

Pretty much all I have done in the past few months is run slowly, I think I'm now at the time where I can start incorporating a weekly speedwork session in my training, and I'm hopeful the book can provide examples of that. There are example plans/schedules in the back of the book.

To begin with, the book starts with "why do we need to slow down", and while I mostly know why, I'm sure it will be a useful refresher, and then I can look at the speedwork suggestions in due course... in fact, my plans for the rest of today is to put my feet up and rest, and start reading this:

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If you would like to check out this activity on strava you can see it here:
https://www.strava.com/activities/10239348629

About the Athlete: Living in the UK, I am an intermittent Runner, but always striving for more consistency. When I'm not training I can be found photographing insects or listening to really loud angry music (which is the best type of music obviously!)

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