An inspiring yoga session today…

After yesterday’s little trot I was surprised that I could walk today and more than surprised that I had a fantastic yoga session.

I find Reas’ philosophy creeping into my life and found myself telling someone last week, ‘you have all you need for success…’ and then realising that this was a direct quote from the sweaty, tough workouts that make Sunday morning so much fun.

Today was a really basic, very tough, intense Astanga session. There was enough room in the class to spread out a little but still enough people to really get that unique vibe flowing (and the floors and walls soon dripping with sweat…). It took me some time to warm up and ease out the kinks but now I have mastered the concept of expecting nothing from the session and letting the breath lead I am opening up new realms of pain and suffering (or to paraphrase Murakami, ‘pain is inevitable…suffering is optional…’).

I am now ready for the training to begin, again, at 6am tomorrow.

Today's Run

A massive jump up in distance this week, due to Philip being away four weekends before Christmas and also as we are doing an Ultrarow on the 7th November, 16 hours on a rower...

Anyway back to today's run, the aim was 15 miles, in the end we did 14.3, further than Philip has ever run. Having deposited water around the course off we set, steady and comfortable, except that Philip can't run in a straight line and kept wanting my space......
.
Everything was going really well until we hit mile 13 then Philip hit the wall, but determination and guts he finished the last bit, I take my hat off for that.

This was a big jump up in distance and Philip did really well, he was disappointed at the end for suffering the last bit, but you learn from this and he will be stronger next time..

This run came earlier in the training plan than scheduled so GOOD WORK PHILIP, keep running.

As for me I thought I deserved a glass of wine and chocolate... ( well even Personal Trainers are allowed a life:)

Trevor

14.3 miles - 2 hours 22 mins

You know that you are making progress when you get back to the gym after a little run and everyone is rushing around trying to give you energy drinks, jelly beans and gels in case you suddenly drop dead.

I kind of felt sorry for Trevor this afternoon as he looked so worried that I was about to keel over and die whilst he had barely broken sweat (this guy is not human – or at least cut from a different cloth then myself). However, what Trevor has yet got a handle on is that by the time I got home, had a long bath and a gallon of fluids I was already working on the next run. What went well today? What went wrong today? What points can I learn from this and how can I improve next time. I had made of list of positives and learning points so that next time I head out it will be smarter. I am never going to be a great runner but I have to play to my strengths – that is my analytical skills, my ability to analyse things and most of all my sheer tenacity.

So, pragmatically…

It was the furthest I have ever run. It was 13 miles of relative pleasure and then a mile and a bit of exquisite pain. You play the odds and this is a result. It was a run where I learnt the importance of gels, the importance of digging deep and the sheer magnitude of the run. If I had not gone out today with a huge degree of respect for the distance I would have been even worse – so this is all something which goes into the planning and strategy for next week.

I leave the hard planning to Trevor but I still take a lot from my own notes – which now run to pages. If I can run close to 15 miles I can run 26 and a bit. I don’t think it will be easy but it will be the ultimate test of my mental tenacity which I think is worth the pain alone.

Friday 28th October

One of the many benefits of being a Personal Trainer is that you get to do your training runs with clients, although as I am finding they all tend to be within a 2/3 day period.

Never mind they are all useful and various paces so that helps my training...

Back to my morning run with Tracey this morning, it's 6.00am, dark, misty and not very nice, I think it's cold, leggings, long sleeved top and jacket, Tracey is in shorts and jacket,10 mins into the run she is complaining of being hot and jacket off.

At the start Tracey says, needs to be a slow one today, which is fine, but Tracey saying a slow run and doing a slow run are 2 different things, off we set, I'm constantly trying to slow the pace down, the only time that happens is when Tracey has her obligatory stop to re-tie her shoe laces, every time........

The pace is constantly getting quicker and quicker, until the last mile until she is now tired and moaning at me to slow down (the cheek) its my job to control the pace.

Good run done, 4.5 miles, feel better for it.

Back to the gym, quick shower then onto training Philip, it's chest and bicep day, his favourite ( not ). Really good session for Philip much better with the weights.

I am now looking forward to 12 or 15 miles with Philip on Saturday.

Everything is coming round so quick, it's only 10 days to our ultra row on the 7th November, and then only 4 months to the Marathon..........

As they say onwards and upwards..

Sympathy for the Devil...?

6am and the alarm goes off.

I roll out of bed to some polite encouragement from my wife of the ‘turn that bloody alarm off…’ ilk and almost fall down the stairs. I get dressed with eyes closed; running shorts, t shirt socks and swear loudly. It’s dark and cold outside and my bed is warm. Not a tough decision really. It’s time to run.

Ten minutes later I am in the gym and on the treadmill. I don’t usually train indoors as it is a good way to get injured but I am tired and cranky and miserable and simply can’t face a run around Bicester in the dark alone.

On goes the IPod and up goes the speed. I start with some James Brown, then onto some Sandie Shaw (which, to be honest, is worth getting out of bed for alone) and then work through some Madonna, Kings of Leon and some Bowie. You got to have Bowie when it gets tough…in fact, I bet I Paula Radcliff sings Jean Genie all the way around on her record breaking runs. Then it’s in to the home straight and Sandie Shaw is willing me on with her seminal cover of the Rolling Stones classic….

So if you meet me
Have some courtesy
Have some sympathy, and some taste

To which I always add…

Because all this running has laid me to waste...

An hour later I am standing in my kitchen, coffee in hand, stretches done and I have to admit that I feel great.

Trevor's Saturday

Saturday 22nd October

It was with joy that I sprung out of bed at 5.45 this morning, meet Philip at 6,30 in the dark and had a joyous 9 mile run, taking in the daybreak and sunshine, finishing at 8.00am to then go to work…….

That is how it should have read, in reality it was a bit more like the following...

It really started a couple of days previous when we were arranging the 9 mile run on Saturday, the time was getting earlier and earlier, due to Philip’s commitments and then mine and we ended up with a start time of 6.30am.

On the whole that is fine, except that I had a small accident the gym on Thursday, I had been talking to Joanne, and giving help (I think that was what she called it) on her routine for her up coming Pole Dancing final. At the end of this I left, only to return to find Andy in there as well now talking to Joanne, anyway they suggested that I try one of the Pole moves, which obviously I did, with scant regard to the fact that I have a marathon and charity Ultrarow coming up. I did the move, not very elegantly, anyway, 3 hours later my back was hurting, by the following morning my back was really stiff and I struggled out of bed. Frantic calls to Paul Skidmore, who is excellent at sports massage on Friday morning and luckily he was able to see me that afternoon. Ninty minutes later I was not cured but feeling better and reassured that I had not done anything too stupid and that I should be able to run the next day.

Come Saturday morning, alarm at 5.45, go to move, oops still stiff as a board, too late to cancel Philip, so with the knowledge from Paul saying you will be fine, I carried on, a bit stiff but able to jog. Philip had seemed to have lost his pace from previous weeks, where we have been averaging 9.15/9.20 per mile, Philip thought today would be a good day to run a bit slower, about 9.53 pace.

Not sure if my back will thank him, I will let you know.

We have been blessed with lovely weather so far, it does make training that much easier, I know we have a lot worse to come.

Today Philip has also informed me that he will be away 4 of the next 8 weekends, so it looks like a lot of long runs during the week…

In the mean time KEEP RUNNING…..

Trevor

Away with the Fairies (9 miles: 1hour 28mins)

Today, we discovered a fundamental flaw in my running…after a few miles I am away with the fairies and forget what I am meant to be doing.

When we got back to my house this morning, on a crisp, beautiful autumn morning, Trevor looked at me worriedly and asked, ‘why so slow today?’
I had to explain to him that although I am a bit tired I am not injured, I am eating ok and that I had found the run beautiful (especially the first mile and a bit in the pitch black…). The problem, from Trevor’s point of view, was that after about five miles I had wandered off to dream land and the pace had dropped significantly. Words like lack of focus and gormless dreamer were not mentioned but they were certainly implied.

Once I have found my legs and my lungs and got them working I find it very hard not to wander into my own private land. I sing songs to myself, I recall whole chunks of books I have read, I make plans for the day and talk through my problems and worries – the running almost seems to come second. However, it seems that I need to keep focused and make sure the pace doesn’t drop (and my argument of Siberia is a bloody long way to go so we best take it slow and enjoy it seems not to hold water..) or I fear that my future holds endless sets of burpees and an annoyed Trevor.

However, just sometimes, when we are out and the sun is just rising and the whole of the world belongs to us I am going to slow the pace down, take in the beauty of the day and store it away for when we are out on the ice and it is cold, tough and miserable.

Katie Says....

I have become a Siberian widow…

Over the last few years I have become used to my husband’s somewhat bizarre lifestyle. I no longer worry when he calmly declares over dinner that he is off to North Korea for a few days, or has a meeting booked somewhere in the Balkans and may be home sometime next week (invariably hungover and looking slightly sheepish) or finding him skulking about the house in the middle of the night with a scotch in his hand and his beloved Miles Davis on the stereo. However, Siberia may well be the final straw.

I don’t mind that he now owns more lycra than me (at least we haven’t seen the hand knitted cardigans yet this winter…), or that I can not get near the washing machine for sweaty gym kit or that he goes out before the dawn several times a week to train with Trevor but I do object with how he passes through the house and simply strip mines it of food. He no longer eats but denudes the place of calories.

For example, the other night I cooked a delicious meal for him. I gave him twice what I had and within thirteen seconds he was licking his lips and looking longingly at mine (even the dog knows better than this…). Twenty minutes later he is back in the kitchen and pounds of qunioa, porridge or barley is disappearing into his bottomless pit whilst I have to hide anything I might potentially like to eat later before that too vanishes. If I am lucky I hear: too much fat or too much salt and know that there will be something left for me when he has finished. Last Saturday I noted, with a degree of awe, that he had seven meals and still he went to bed complaining of hunger.

For me, at least, the race can not come soon enough or else Sainsburys will soon be delivering food by the pallet load.

(Post script - made a mistake tonight - cooked low fat banana bread....which lasted a whole five mins...)

Trevor's Update

Now I’m not as amusing as Philip at writing these Blogs, but I will tell you straight...

Its Thursday the 20th October, I have had another tough week of training, I also had a massage with Paul Skidmore at The Fitness Company on Monday (although after my hamstring felt as if I had tweaked it, it feels ok now).
I’m sat here writing this, my shoulder hurts, my back aches and I feel tired (even PT’s are allowed to feel tired). Anyways, enough sob story, just to let you know what is planned this weekend. I have a quick 4.5 miles tomorrow morning followed by weights later, also I get the pleasure to train Philip.

Then at stupid a clock on Saturday morning we will have a 9 mile run ( at the moment it will be cold, good practice I suppose).

Another blatant plug to raise money, Philip & I are doing a 16hr rowathon on Monday 7th November at The Fitness Company, this is to help raise the money for Iain Rennie Grove House Hospice Care Charity, come along on the day and support us, 16 hrs.’ is a long time, also pop into the Fitness Company and have a go on the sweep stake board to guess how far we will row on the day, £2.00 per go, £50.00 to the nearest choice and the rest of the money to charity,

Legs and Arms

Yesterday, I had a beast of a work-out.

By the time I had finished training my legs and triceps, which is my favourite workout, I staggered out of the gym feeling weary and sore. It was a wonderful feeling. It is a sweet mixture of pain and pleasure which means a job well done (both from Trevor and myself) and a few days of soreness to come. These days always take me back to the core reason why we are doing this: because we know that sometime in the future we wont be able to do this and that each rep, each curl and each mile we run will help change a few lives.

Over the last few weeks we have talked a lot about the marathon.; the distance, the pain, the relentless training but we have not lost our sense of wonder that we will soon run across a frozen lake in Russia. Our wives may well divorce us, our toe-nails may well turn black and we may be permanently sore but at the end of the day people will benefit from this.

I think that above all this keeps me sane.