Evening Run -17km (an attempt at hill reps, in the rain)

dannewton just finished a 17.59km run, that lasted for 116 minutes.
This run helped dannewton burn 1336.0 calories.

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Description from Strava: Yep, I'll admit... trying to do my first set of hill reps in a long time, in such awful weather might not have been the best idea... but there was a reason for it, honest!

The reason started yesterday. On Wednesday's I have started to do some speedwork (interval) sessions to break up the rest of the long slow runs I do. Its only a recent addition, but its one that I'm really enjoying. It makes a change to push a little harder than I would usually. Unfortunately, yesterdays weather was like the picture below:

This was taken at around lunchtime, and it looked like a beautiful day out there, cold (obviously), but beautiful nonetheless. I nipped outside to put some rubbish out, to find out that it was treacherously slippery. And I mean to the point of being dangerous. By the time it reached late afternoon, this had partially melted and then refrozen into patches of black ice. And this meant that as much as I wanted to run yesterday, it just wasn't worth the risk of injury. At any step I could slip, and doing that at speed would be an accident waiting to happen.

This meant I had no option but to run today, but true to our variable weather we have at the moment, the conditions were completely different:

Rain.

Lots of heavy rain, and strong winds, for the whole evening.

Not ideal!

Its been wet all day, and was only going to get worse... and I decided I had no choice but to get on with it. I picked the simple safe route of the bypass, and I was just going to run up and down it, until I got fed up (or completely soaked through, which ever came first!

After work I arrived back home at 6pm, and immediately got changed before my brain could provide a sensible reason to stay inside. As I knew it was going to chuck it down the whole session, I was suitably prepared with a proper waterproof jacket, tights, gloves and a hat (and the headtorch too).

Speedwork session postponed 'til next week, I chose to just go out and run some easy miles... almost as a box ticking exercise, just to get 'something' done.

I quickly realised that doing an 'easy run' was not very motivating, and after 20 minutes of running in those miserable conditions I needed something else to focus on, to get me through it.

4km away (along the bypass) is a long steady hill. Its not too steep, but I have already previously measured it as being around 1km long. In the past few weeks as part of my interval training, I had considered hill reps, and this looked like a suitable starting point.

While out running tonight, just as I started running down the hill, I decided to give it a 'test run' tonight, in the hopes it would keep me motivated

So I did!

You can see the elevation change in the hills in the picture above. I decided to try to easy myself into it gently, by A) only doing 3 reps and B) by only pushing a little harder than I would normally run up the hill. This was purely so I could make sure I was able to complete the session without overdoing

Its very easy to be too eager and over do it.

And I'm quite happy with how this unexpected session turned out. In time I would like to build up the reps, and also decrease the rest period between them. You can see in the picture that after running up each 'hill' there was a flat bit of running to help recover. In future I'll be wanting to stop that, and just run up and down the hill over again.

But that is for another time....

The much bigger benefit tonight is of course that I was so preoccupied running up and done and counting reps, that I pretty much ignored the weather (which was useful as I gotta tell you, it was grim out there today!

After doing the reps, I then turned and took it easy while running home. All my kite is of course absolutely soaked through, and is now hanging to dry all over the house. Hopefully it'll dry in time for the easy recovery run tomorrow. The forecast tomorrow evening is dry, which is a relief! But, the weather Saturday morning looks to be another wet, soggy run...

Oh well... it'll be a good opportunity to practice my mental resilience I guess!

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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/10344610291

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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