Numbers, numbers everywhere.

I don’t want to bore you.

I started this blog for me really but it’s been gratifying to see the number of people reading my blog and commenting on Twitter and Facebook.
 

So I don’t want this just to be a list of my training each week - it’s boring for you and for me.
 

Anyway, I have something on my mind and want to talk about Metrics. Some runners love them, some hate them.
 

But I’ll start with a quick summary of the week. This was a strong week of running which opened with a 23km long run.
 

I racked up a few decent runs to work and back and had my best ever interval session on the treadmill on Thursday. I’m able to hold higher speeds for longer and still have a strong ‘cool down’.
 

But on to metrics. One thing that is very important, in my career as well running, is to make the important measurable rather than making the measurable important and I think that is something people get wrong in all walks of life.
 

As I finished my treadmill run on Friday I knew that 8 - 10 more minutes more could have brought me above 50 miles training for the week and I was tempted. But to me that extra distance would have just been ‘junk miles’ - running with no purpose my run that day was just a gentle session aimed at getting my legs moving and then doing some stretching..

I will bust a gut to stick to numerical targets in long runs (ie distance covered) or in intervals (how long you hold a threshold split) but when it comes to adding a bit here or there to meet a notional target that might sounds important I can’t see the point.

We have so many ways of measuring these days with GPS watches and heart rate monitors but we need to save them for the quality runs and I think I’ll stick to my plan of making the important measurable.
 

But this week also showed me that I need not to think of measuring as something to do during and before my runs, I also need to do a bit more planning planning in my long runs.
 

I am keen to keep increasing my long runs by a few kilometres each week to make the step-up natural. But this week I got close to home and realised that I was going to come in at the same distance as the previous week.
 

I soon learned that adding distance to the end of a run is difficult - it’s hard not to retrace your steps and psychologically it’s difficult running past your house and back again and I found myself checking my watch far too frequently - what felt like a kilometres during out to be 250 metres and it took the pleasure out of the previous 20km.
 

I ended up with a good run but a more important lesson learned.