Change of plan

In the last 6 months I feel like I've changed my mind a lot about my running and since my last post I have again. In fact it was about a week after my last post I changed my mind.  I was aiming to do the Mamores VK in September. While it is plenty of time to train, my lack of fitness at the moment especially on the hills is there to see in my parkruns.  I have done Tollcross, Drumchapel and the new Ruchill parkrun which are all pretty hilly in the last few months and struggled in all of them. In each one I have got half way round and then had to walk/run for the remainder. In Ruchill, which I did yesterday, I had been ill in my bed all week and actually tried to take it as easy as possible and still had to walk.  At the moment doing hilly parkruns or hilly 10ks are tough enough never mind doing actual hill races.

The funny thing is that in the last year I have still not gone a week where I have not been running. And I think this past week is the first time I have been ill in the last year which is quite impressive. But it does beg the question of what is going wrong, especially on the hilly courses.  I did do Harlow and Springburn in April which I did times which is more of the kind I would expect of around 27 minutes.  That's still a minute off what I was doing last year.  But I think it comes down to a bad diet and not being active enough when I'm not running.  Also in terms of actual runs they are a bit of a state - no actual structure. Also a big thing I think is that even though in the last 3 months I have been averaging 2-4 runs a week, I have only gone over 10 miles in one week, once.  This definitely needs to change.

So what is the plan now?  Well first things first. The 10,000 steps a day for 100 days challenge starts on the 24th May.  This really changed things for me last year and hopefully will bring along the same kind of results this year.  The difference this year is I have entered a race at the end of the August when the challenge finishes and that is the Great Aberdeen half.  No pressure on time just want to finish. In order to bring structure I have got a training plan which doesn't focus on distance, but on time on feet.  This is something I haven't done before as I have always done certain distances, so it will be interesting to see how it goes. I'll see how the rest of May goes then if I can run for 45 minutes without stopping, I ll enter the Mens 10k in June.