My first evening run!

As my training needs to step up a notch, I am now going to be including a mid-week run every week, or every week I can. Some things are bound to come up that prevent it. I have stayed away from doing this so far as I feel that running in my village at night isn't the safest of options. The paths and roads are poorly lit and there aren't really all that many roads to run on anyway. However, now that Hannah is helping out with my training, we can sensibly run in another village.

There is also a slight change of focus in the training that goes along with the mid-week runs. So far I've been aiming mainly for fitness and getting faster on the short runs I do. Whilst that is good to get started and build fitness, especially with the hill running Ant and I do, it won't get me to the distance required for a marathon on it's own. As such Hannah and I will be aiming to run at a consistent pace, but to increase the distance over time. The fitness and speed stuff will continue with Ant. The pace we're aiming for, since Hannah insists on doing things in Km, is 6 mins/Km. This is also 9:40 mins/mile in my head. This pace should be something we can maintain for the hours we'll be running a marathon for rather than a sprint or fast run pace. If we can keep it up, this would give us a time of roughly 4 hours 15 mins. As our target is 4 hours 30 mins, that should give us time to stop for a wee, re-tie shoe laces etc on the day.

Hannah had been having a look at a map of Woodford, and came up with a decent circuit we could give a try. As we kayak with a few other friends on a Wednesday, we're aiming for Thursdays. Since today is Thursday, we met up to see how we got on. As we were busy running, we left the photos to Felix, my good friend and Hannah's boyfriend. This is us finishing the run. Hannah vetoed photos that should us in any greater detail!

Hannah had hoped the loop would be 7Km or so, but it turned out to be 4.8Km. All the same, it's somewhere to start but next time we'll need to put in another loop to push things on. I managed to get all the way round without stopping, or even really slowing at all, in 26:41 mins. This means an average time of 5:37 mins/Km, so a good pace to start with as it's faster than the final pace needs to be. Now I just need to work on keeping it up over a greater distance!