Made it to half way

Photo by morgan sarkissian on Unsplash

Well, I'm now officially halfway through my training, which I'm really chuffed with on the one hand, and slightly anxious about on the other. 

Looking at the weeks ahead, training seems to really ramp up the running durations. Now I've been sceptical about whether I could last the prescribed number of minutes before and have been pleasantly surprised, but before I was increasing in increments of 1 or 2 minutes.  I'm about to embark on the next 6 weeks of training, and I'm noticing increasing increments of 5, 10, and even 20 minutes. Week 10, for example looks like this: 

Day 1: Run 20, Walk 2, Run 20

Day 2: Run 25

Day 3: Run 40

...which, at this moment, looks a bit intimidating. 

I had a look at my DCCT plan to see if it was equally ambitious, and was a little reassured to read that it is easier to progress from 5k to 10k than to go from 0 to 5k. So that may explain why the training increments in the 2nd half of my plan look so scary. I shall trust that my fitness has improved enough over the past 6 weeks to tackle what lies ahead.

I've been looking at some of my figures and it seems that if I ran 10k at my current running pace it would take 1:06 (6:40 per km). My 5k race time should currently be around 33:20 therefore. That's not very quick but I'm holding off worrying about pace until I can run for that duration. Endurance was always going to be my biggest challenge, so I'd like my lungs to be fit for purpose first. 

I've also been exploring some local routes so I can vary things a bit during training. Conveniently, 10k just so happens to be the distance from my home to my workplace, so I suppose I could make running to work a long distance goal (no pun intended) closer to the race. There is a local attraction and also a circular walk nearby that are also 10k in length, so I have a few training options for longer runs down the line when I can run that far. The circular route is on trails though, which would be a new challenge altogether.

I've also just done some maths and by the looks of it the day I should complete my training will be 23rd December. Well that would be a nice Christmas present. Lets hope the roads are still runnable by then.