Exciting Week

This past week was a very exciting and nerve wracking week, not from a running or training point of view but from a personal view point. Last Thursday I proposed to my girlfriend Molly and thankfully she said yes 😊 The whole week leading up to this left me very nervous with lots of planning and making sure she didn’t find the engagement ring or get a sense of the surprise that was on the way! Luckily everything went to plan and I managed to mumble some sort of incoherent proposal as I shook with nerves along the edge of the Howth Cliff Walk!

Running as it usually does for me provided a great distraction earlier in the week. I managed to get 2 let’s say faster sessions completed. I was very conscious that I have not completed any speed/power based sessions over the last few months so on Monday I attacked a 10 x 30 secs hills session with jog back recovery. Hills as they usually do left my legs fairly fatigued afterwards but know it will help improve my power and speed. I find hills great for helping with speed without having to do manic speed track sessions which my body doesn’t respond well to! Wednesday I completed a 5 mile tempo session in 27.39. The plan was to try and increase pace slightly each mile which resulted in the following mile splits:

· 5.38

· 5.35

· 5.35

· 5.27

· 5.23

Was actually really happy with this run and starting to feel as though I am getting back to where I was around July/August! Didn’t manage to get a run in on Thursday as I was a bit preoccupied and on Friday I manged 4 miles late in the evening after I finally recovered from far too many celebratory engagement drinks! Finished off the week with 12 miles in 1.22 in an absolutely rain soaked and muddy Phoenix Park yesterday morning where I managed to slip and fall over about 20 seconds into my run ☹ Felt fine after it with just my pride taking a fairly big dent as quite a few witnessed the fall but were very nice about it and checked whether I was ok, I made an attempt at some sort of a joke and off I went. Nice round number of 50 miles for the week and as mentioned last week this is where I want to be over the next number of weeks.

3 of my runners who started with me back at the beginning of October also had big weeks with time trials on the cards for them! First up was Eddie McCardle who completed a 5k time trial in 20.17 which is over 50 seconds faster than his previous best over 5k. Eddie has had to deal with a few niggles over the last few weeks and we had to adjust his training and avoid some of the faster sessions but still showed huge improvement week on week and produced a really gutsy run with great scope for even further improvement!

Grainne Gibson was down to run a 10k Time Trial on Thursday and ran a brilliant 55.37 on a hilly route around Bailieborough. Grainne ran a Virtual half Marathon at the end of October in 2.12 and since then has continued to make massive improvements completing great sessions every week showing great consistency and an eagerness to get better and better with the best definitely yet to come!

On Friday Anyhony McGibney attacked a 10k time trial. Anthony is a very accomplished adventure runner. With no adventure races on right now or on the horizon Anthony wanted to use this time valuably and work on improving his running! He has completed some great sessions over the last few months and gets on with everything with the absolute minimum of fuss. Anthony ran a brilliant 39.38 in the dark as he described 😉 This is his first time under 40 mins and definitely has the capability to bring his times down even further!

Great to see the improvements above and great to see people continually getting better and putting the work in with many more of my runners continuing to make similar progress! Would love to say this is down to me but really its down to their hard work and dedication 😊

Have a great week folks!

Noel