Hills

Hope everyone is having a great Christmas! I travelled home to Cavan last Monday and was looking forward to get some decent and easy runs in over the Christmas period. I didn’t really account for the fact that there is no real easy runs around home with hills in abundance regardless of route selected. In saying that really happy with the past weeks training covering just over 50 miles with plenty of food and alcohol consumed! See a summary of my week below:

Monday: 3.5 miles very easy before I left Dublin. Didn’t have much time to get anything else done with packing up etc.

Tuesday: 7.1 miles in 53.30 in Bailieborough Forest. Great to be back running here where I’ve done many of my runs down through the years. About 15 years ago you’d be lucky to see anyone else running at all, great to see so many people out getting the miles in!

Wednesday: 7 miles easy in just over 50 mins with my brother. So used to doing all of my runs on my own lately so great to have some company and made the run fly by. I do like doing some of my runs on my own as I like to think over things and daydream for an hour or so but I love the social element of getting out for a run with somebody and having a chat for an hour 😊

Thursday/ Christmas Eve: 2 mile easy 2 mile steady 2 mile hard 2 mile easy

Happy with this one, wanted to get one harder effort in this week so after 2 mile easy worked down to 5.49 for the next 2 miles before getting down to 5.38 & 5.35 for next 2 miles before finishing off with 2 more miles to round out 8 miles in just under 50 mins! Thought I’d run a bit faster for the middle 4 mile section but picked quite an up and down route for the session so overall quite content!

Friday/ Christmas Day: Got out early for 10 miles in 75 mins on one of the hilliest routes I’ve ran in a long time which helped get rid of some of the beer consumed from the night before. Always love getting out for a run on Christmas morning.

Saturday: 7.1 miles in 51.46. Another run to sweat the alcohol and food out of my system but also to refresh the head. Good to get outdoors over the Christmas period. Although I do love spending the majority of the day doing nothing watching movies/sport etc.

Sunday: 7.6 miles in 54 mins getting badly caught in the middle of the run with a refreshing snow shower. Although as my brother stated there was nothing refreshing about it 😉

So that’s the week, taking a rest day today as body probably needs it just to absorb last weeks training and freshen the body up. This week will be similar to last week before slightly upping it in January providing the body is ready and willing!

As we move into 2021 if you have any running goals you want to achieve or if you just want to get a bit more consistent and are looking for a bit more accountability email me @ noelcarrollrunning@gmail.com for info on my online coaching plans!

Have a great week folks 😊

Noel