Marathon Training: Week One

Blood, Sweat, and… Wait, Blood?

That was my reaction, but we’ll get to that at the end. First things first, I made it through the week! Some parts were a little harder than I was expecting, while some parts were a little easier. I’ll go through each run below and add my thoughts where I have them.

Tempo Run (Monday)— 5km at 13km/h:

This is my 10km pace. At least, it’s my 10km pace according to the 10km I ran to serve as my base for working out my target paces back on New Year’s Day. I figured this one would be the easiest run of the week; it’s a 5km run at a pace I know I can maintain over twice that distance. It should be a piece of cake, right?

Only it wasn’t. It turned out to be the hardest run of the week, and it’s got me a little concerned for all the longer tempo runs to come (now, obviously longer corresponds to slower, but the differences in each should balance out and so the difficulty, in theory, carries over).

I wonder if this is because on the day I set my base time everything just seemed to fall perfectly into place. As a result, I bettered my old PB by over two and a half minutes. Maybe that’s not an accurate representation of where I really am as a runner right now. That’s the nagging doubt, and only time will tell if it’s true.

Speed Work (Wednesday)— 8 x 400m at 15km/h:

I was dreading speed work, thinking it would be the hardest part of the plan. It may well turn out to be, when it picks up, but the first week started off with only 8 reps (eventually I’ll be building up to 12) at a fast but manageable jog, with one minute walking rests between them. The key word there is manageable, as I felt pretty good, even at the end.

I was previously doing intervals at 14, 15, and 16km/h respectively, fitting in three or four weeks at the end of last year, before ditching that schedule to start marathon training instead. Perhaps my body was already better prepared for speed work as a result, compared to tempo runs and steady-paced long runs. But again, I don’t really know.

Long Slow Run (Thursday) — 15km at 7.5km/h:

This was one of my bonus runs; it’s not on the plan, but I wanted to “treat” myself. The theory goes that keeping the pace slow ensures a lower heart rate and doesn’t take too much out of my legs, allowing me to get some time in to hopefully improve aerobic capacity and also letting me work on my running form, particularly my foot strike at a controlled, comfortable pace.

I did this on the treadmill at work (which is where I plan to do almost all of my tempo running and speed work, if the Covid situation doesn’t get worse and the office closes down again), but in future I plan to simply run home on Thursday evenings.

I want to run home for a couple of reasons. One, running outside is just more enjoyable, and two, it takes me an hour to get home on the subway and two to do my slow 15km runs. That’s three hours between getting off work and arriving home. As I live more or less exactly 15km from my office, it makes far more sense just to run home and save myself an hour (and 4RMB. That’s what this is really about, the money).

Long Run (Saturday) — 16.5km at 11.4*km/h:

I put an asterisk there because that’s my target speed. On the day, I overshot it and averaged 11.75km/h. This is the only one of the three must-do runs that I ran outside, rather than using a treadmill, and as such it was the only one that required me to pace myself (with the help of Keep’s needlessly stern automated voice).

I really struggled with the pacing. Previously, I’ve just gone out and run at whatever pace felt comfortable on a given day and I find I naturally fall into a groove where each split is pretty consistent. With a specific pace target though, it feels a lot less natural and I’m definitely going to need some time to get used to it.

It’s going to take me some time to get used to pacing these runs, as you can see I went out way too hard at the start and also let it slip just before my turnaround. I sped up towards the end on purpose, just cos my legs were feeling okay and I really just wanted to get back home by that point.

Thankfully run-tracking with Keep allows me to set a target pace and the app then gives me real-time feedback when I’m going too fast, too slow, or just right, and I don’t have to wait til the end of each kilometre to see the split and realise I’ve been running way off pace for a whole five minutes.

I was expecting the long run portion of training to be difficult but manageable and at least with this first run I think that’s pretty much how it turned out; I did feel very tired by the end, but I ended fast and most of my splits were at the faster end of my targeted range or even faster. If I can regulate my pace a bit better then the longer runs to come should be achievable, although I’m under no illusions that they won’t prove to be very hard work.

Oh, also, about that blood. I didn’t feel any discomfort at all when I was out there on the run, but as soon as taking my shoes off when I got home, I discovered my right sock was filled with blood. Well, to say “filled” might be a bit melodramatic, and the sweat undoubtedly made things look worse than they were, but I’ll drop a picture below. After showering I couldn’t see a wound of any kind and there wasn’t any pain, so I find the whole thing a little mystifying.

At the time I honestly had no idea where all this blood came from. I figured it was maybe an old blood blister that I’d failed to notice and had healed over, before the calloused skin broke during my run and that’s why I didn’t feel anything.

Long Slow Run (Sunday) — 16.5km at 8.8km/h:

This was my second slow run of the week. I’m looking for a variety of paces with these runs, adding variance to the other benefits I mentioned above. Therefore, I set myself a slightly faster pace of around 8.2km/h and then completely failed to stick to it. I’ve found that it’s really quite hard to maintain slower speeds without naturally getting faster as you zone out and stop focusing on your legs.

Zoning out and speeding up is definitely what happened towards the end of this run, and when I realised it (after Keep told me I’d run a sub six-minute kilometre) I thought screw it, opened the taps a little and ran the next 1000m at something around 10km pace.

Incidentally, if you want an example of why not to buy a Samsung Galaxy Active, mine recorded my fastest split (where I must have been going at least 13km/h) as only 10 seconds faster than the preceding easy/steady kilometre (roughly 10km/h) which it claimed was only 3 seconds faster than the one before that where I was still going slow (around 9km/h). Honestly, it doesn’t matter how fast or slow I go, that thing just seems to pick a random split between 5:50 and 5:10.

Slow run splits for reference. I ran about the same distance as the long run the day before, but at a much slower pace.

Anyway, I got back and discovered that my right sock was yet again full of blood, only this time there was even more of it, so clearly the blood blister theory was way off. I had a closer look and found a pin-prick sized hole on the inside of the toe adjacent to the one that I had thought was the problem.

When I took my sock off both times the middle toe was covered in blood and the others were fairly clean. I assumed that meant that that was the problem toe and it took me a while to even think about checking the toes on either side.

The second time looked a lot more gruesome. Now I know where I’m leaking from I can put a plaster on it before my next run and see how things go. (Still can’t figure out why it didn’t hurt though.)

Oh, and as another aside, I did both slow runs in the Gel-Pulse 10s, and while the right heal started to feel a little uncomfortable towards the end of Thursday’s run, it wasn’t chaffing in quite the same way it had been at the weekend, and on Sunday there was no discomfort at all, so fingers crossed it was just a first-run issue and hopefully now I’ve already broken them in.