Its Official!!

Today is a notable day. Today I received confirmation of my entry into the 100k race. As mentioned before its run in conjunction with the Great Lake Rely, so I was a little amused to see that I'm noted down as being the manager of a team of one!



This week also marks the start of some serious, more specific ultramarathon training. Over the coming weeks its my intention to use this blog to record my training and my thoughts around it. I've never taken on an ultra before so a lot of my idea's a just theory to me at the moment. Using this blog will help me track how things go.

This week is a bit of a transition week while I bed down my training schedule. From next week I'll be recording my intended training schedule and the thinking behind it, and then de-brief on the outcome at the end of the week. My idea is to repeat this week on week.

That's the idea anyway!

Hows the Running Going?

Pretty good actually. I'm fairly laid back at this stage of the game and just really focusing on getting my tempo set with lots of shortish runs. As a result my speed is increasing. I few weeks ago I ran a half marathon PB and I'm now consistently running around 7.30min miles and occasionally dipping below 7min.

All of this begs the question (which has been asked by the way) "what good is improving speed in short runs if your "A" race is a 100k ultra?"

Fair question, here was my answer:

You are absolutely right, running at that pace in a 100k probably isn't going to work out. My plan though is to build up speed in the "off season" and focus on distance from October onwards (essentially starting with the Auckland Marathon - of course there is also the added motivation of keeping the speed up for the Rotorua Half IM, since I'll be doing it in a team I really want to KILL the run course!).

I've found over the last year, and particuarly during Ironman that I got locked into a set tempo which was relatively slow. This was really hard to break out of, so I'm basically trying to re-train my legs to turn over faster. I know fitness wise I can sustain a much quicker marathon pace than I've run in the past, its just a matter of building the tempo and training the legs turnover at the right tempo. For the 100k I'm planning on targeting a pace of roughly 30 - 45 seconds (per k) slower than I'm running at the moment (bear in mind that I expect my "marathon pace" to increase between now and then meaning my 100k pace will in effect be closer to 1 min slower than my "marathon pace" (therefore around 5 min - 5.10 min k's) - well that's the plan anyway. For now its all about building speed and locking in a faster tempo.

At least that's the broad plan ...