End of Season Round-Up

Well it's been a long time since I last updated my blog, but I've had a very busy and successful few months so I'm going to let myself off with a warning not to neglect this for quite so long in future. Juggling 2 jobs, training and racing generally means that the act of writing about the training and racing gets neglected in favour of sleep and recovery!

When I posted 2 months ago I talked about wanting to stay fit and healthy in 2014 - so far that's going pretty well.

I've just finished my 2013/4 XC season, and without a doubt it's been my best cross-country season ever. Over the last 6 months I've done every race I'd planned to do, and I've NEVER managed this before. For a few consecutive years I've had tonsilitis or bronchitis, and invariably picked up ankle injuries from the rough terrain. This season I've avoided colds and coughs and whilst I did have a minor ankle sprain from stumbling on a tree root during a race, it only put me out of training for a few days and didn't interfere with my racing plans.

Main achievements:

• 3rd at County Champs
• 33rd at Midlands Champs
• 63rd at National Champs

At the start of the season I was trying to race myself back to fitness after missing months of training with a knee injury (cycling-related), and I decided I wanted to race well at those 3 races. Now I'm at the end of the season I'm very happy to have had good races when it mattered most to me. My coach, Phil Nichol, has done a fantastic job of building up my training whilst allowing me to race reasonably well throughout the season, before tapering down for the Midlands and the Nationals.
This year I've trained differently to any other year, combining shorter track reps with tempo sessions, long runs and slightly longer interval sessions. I've really enjoyed the Winter training and I think it's actually been the first year I've looked forward to every session - though with tempo sessions I think I've mostly been looking forward to the end of the session! It's a big change from previous years when I've felt like a lot of Winter training has been one log slog - perhaps the shorter training is part of the reason I've stayed illness and injury free, as my body hasn't taken quite such a battering!

So, Winter 2013/4 = SUCCESS!

However, this isn't a totally smug post. I had also been targeting a few Spring Duathlons with the aim of qualifying for the World Duathlon Champs, and due to a recurring knee injury brought on my cycling, I've struggled to get the training in. I've managed a bike ride of over 40 minutes only once in the last 10 months and that was followed by a week of knee pain. Of course I then tried to do this again a week later and the problem recurred, so I made possibly the MOST sensible decision of my sporting career and called a halt to cycle training and any hopes of representing GB at duathlon this year.
Last year I ignored a cycling injury till I could neither run, cycle, swim or walk. The year before I ignored a different cycling injury till I was in hospital.
This year I've learnt from my mistakes and I'm going to make the most of being able to run (and walk) and  focus on having a fab track season.

Right now I'm in the middle of my end of season break. While I am sad not to be racing at this weekend's duathlon, I am enjoying giving my body time to recover from 6 months of hard, tiring XC racing. All that mud and rain does get a bit much after a while, but I'm sure I'll be super excited to get stuck back in by the time October comes around. I know I'll definitely miss the XC atmosphere - for team spirit there's nothing else like it in running and I've loved lining up with my Telford AC team mates throughout the season. I've made some new friends in the Midlands and we've developed some healthy rivalries with the Wolverhampton and Tipton Ladies.

On reflection my main achievements aren't just the positions I've finished but the things I've gained as a person on the way to achieving those results and the experiences I've had.

Main Achievements:

• Racing an entire XC season without illness or injury
• Not missing a week's training for 6 months
• Getting my long run up to 13 miles (though this was a 1 off!)
• Discovering the training that works for me as an athlete
• Building friendships and rivalries with fellow runners
• Enjoying it all!

National XC 2014

A beautiful sunny day at Wollaton Park, Nottingham - my favourite XC venue.

A HUGE race with over 700 finishers, won by European XC medallist, Gemma Steel.
There can't be many races where club-standard competitors can line up against international medallists!

In a race that big, it can be hard to quantify what would be classified as a good race for you as an individual, and it can be even harder in a field that size to work out if you're in the process of achieving a decent result.

Before the race I'd said that I wanted to come in the top 100. Last year I was 102nd in a much smaller field at the Nationals in Sunderland, so top 100 seemed like a good target.

With so many in the field I made sure I got a good start but after a mile I realised I had very little idea if I was having a good race or not - unlike the Midlands where I know most of the athletes, I could see very few familiar faces and I could tell there were a fair few athletes in front of me!
I quickly realised the only way I could guarantee I was running a race I could be proud of, was to focus on running as hard as I could and not worry about anybody else.

It turned out to me a good tactic as I had my best ever XC race, finishing 63rd and giving it everything I had. Not a bad improvement from last year!

A New Year, A New Approach

The end of another year always makes me pause for reflection and look back on the events of the last 12 months. I know it’s an arbitrary point in the sand, and there’s no need to wait till the end of the year to review life and make any changes – but tradition dictates that the beginning of a new year is the time for resolutions and alterations so I feel inclined to pause for breath and consider the past year and how I’d like the next 12 months to go.

At the start of 2013 I had some exciting sporting aims, some of which I achieved and some I didn’t. And unfortunately some I never even got to have a go at achieving. With the World Triathlon Champs set for September 2013 in London over the iconic Olympic course in Hyde Park, I made this my main sporting aim for the year. My main aim was to qualify and I planned my season around this and entered various qualifying events over various distances. I never made it to the start line of a single qualification race, let alone the start line of the World Triathlon Championships themselves. After working single-mindedly towards a goal like this, it was a massive blow to miss so badly!

I try to think optimistically about all my races and sporting experiences – even if I have a bad race there’s usually something I can learn from it! I had a terrible race at the British Duathlon Champs this year, but I learnt that I am terrified of under-taking lorries downhill on busy A-roads and that it is very hard to run when my feet are completely numb. I bounced back from that to take bronze at the English National Duathlon Champs a few weeks later with a much better performance on a totally different course in totally different conditions. From there on I had a good couple of weeks, setting my first personal bests since 2007 – clocking 37.54 for 10km and 18.16 for 5km at the beginning of May. From there on, there’s not much of note to report. Illness and injury prevented me from racing and on the weekend of the World Triathlon Champs I was struggling round 5 miles with my knee still sore from injury but pleased to be completing my longest run for 4 months!

Sporting wise, which is what this blog is all about after all, it’s been a fairly disappointing last half of the year. What have I learnt from this though? Well I think I may have FINALLY learnt to listen to my body. I can still remember the exact moment at which I knew I was injured, and I wonder now if I’d backed off then instead of trying to push on for a couple more days, whether I would have recovered a lot quicker. For 2014 my main aim is not to get injured – if that means missing a few days training or replacing run sessions with swimming, then so be it. I’d rather run 300 days in a year and never set another pb, than miss months with injury each year! Hopefully listening to my body and being a lot more sensible with conditioning, core work and building flexibility and strength will actually allow me to run more AND set pbs – but we’ll have to see!

Aims for 2014? To be fit and healthy! I would like to run well and I would love to set some pbs, but this year my main aim is to avoid injury…oh and I’m going to switch things round from the last few years and not race any triathlons in 2014. I’m going to focus on the Spring Duathlon season before returning to my athletics roots and racing on the track this summer. From June onwards my longest race will be no more than twenty minutes, and if I do a few 800ms then I hope it will be a lot less than that! I can’t wait!

Happy running in 2014 everyone!