Week 1 - beginning the plan, proper.

Don't you just hate it when you spend 30 minutes typing in a new blog entry, and then you hit a button to insert a graphic resulting in Blogger vapourising your prose. Gone. And as Tom Hanks put it in You've Got Mail, "I was eloquent, dammit".

New plan for blogging. Write it somewhere else safer. Somewhere that auto-saves the text. Somewhere like OpenOffice. Somewhere not like an IE7beta2 window. I should have known better, especially as it's sort of my job.

I had been banging on about Bank Holidays in the UK. Last weekend was a national holiday, for which the term “Bank Holiday” has become very much part of the language wallpaper. But why the hell are banks anything to do with national holidays in the UK? Wikipedia thinks that it knows, with Bank Holidays being enshrined into UK legislation over 100 years ago, but in the Banking and Financial Dealings act 1871. This kind of thing is just bloody typical in the UK, and to my mind, plain wrong. It's not like I'm unhappy about having a few days off each year, no! It's that we can't be honest about things, and have a separate act for “Banking” and “National Holidays”.

On the other hand, it's this sort of mad quirkiness which makes the UK such an endearing and eccentric place to say you live in. Apparently.

Just don't get me started on the un-written constitution.

Ah, but how does some bizarre decision in 1871 relate to running? Well, Bank Holidays weekends usually mean a day off on Monday. And a lie-in on a Bank Holiday Monday morning is itself a national institution, observed by anyone who doesn't have young kids and who has remained in the country rather than fly out to Malaga or Tenerife. As an exception to the “young kids” rule, my wife usually observes the tradition whilst I feed and entertain my 3 year old daughter until the appointed hour.

This results in no early running. However, lengthening days do allow for running after 9pm without returning in the dark, so this is what I've been doing this week, Monday because of the reasons above, and Wednesday because I had an early train to catch for the Smoke.

Monday went well. I'm still getting used to Mr Garmin abandoning me suddenly when the intervals come to an end – it always seems to start and finish with a “run” interval, when I expected it to finish with a Walk. I've also adjusted the intervals to be 1 minute running, 90 seconds walking as I was finding the 2 minutes between each run a bit boring. This is the run I'm counting as the "start" of the plan, as it's a Monday and matches the training calendar I'm using.

Wednesday was going well until Mr G packed up. As you'll see from the intervals below, it looked like it was having some problems getting a position lock in the 2 intervals before it ran out of juice. I have been toying with lengthening my stride which has resulted in two things.

1) my estimated pace increases to something way too fast and
2) I might have slightly over cooked my calf muscle again. Which went straight back on ice.



We'll see what Friday brings – I might push that run back a day if I've still got some calf pain. And I'll keep an eye on Pace to make sure I don't over do it. I think an 8:40 mile is a comfortable target at the moment, but will probably slow this back as the running intervals become longer.

Mr Stumble.