La Haule to La Moye and back

I've had a few weeks now of pretty heavy (for me) training. Heavy in the sense of there being four or five sessions a week, but not necessarily the same sort of distance as I was doing training for the marathon last year.

Most of it has been at a fairly steady pace as I'm following an 80/20 sort of plan. There's still been time for the occasional quick Parkrun though but mainly the distance has been climbing again, up to 9 miles last weekend.

This Sunday just gone though I thought I'd break with the plan a little. There's still 9 weeks until the Reading Half Marathon so I thought I'd push myself a little with a 7 mile run at a fairly quick pace. Going uphill for the first half at least. I thought I'd have half an eye on my heart rate monitor too though. Weather could have been better...

Well my HRM became unreliable pretty quickly and I think I set out uphill too hard so threw in a couple of walks early on but actually I did one of the better long training runs ever. I like to track my quarter-marathon times and this one was my 8th best ever, and 4th when I take out races - just about half a minute over 60 minutes. Bearing in mind this was a training run, being only a fraction outside two hour Half-marathon pace (having had a couple of short walks) is pretty alright in my book.

Next week I'm pretty sure I'll be back to the steady long runs with a 10-miler but it was good to push myself, especially while I'm between races, just that little bit harder.