Ep 18 - Event Days Loom, An Update

The host of the Progress Pod discusses his upcoming races, the Great Scottish Run Half Marathon and the Dunoon Ultra Marathon. He talks about his training progress, his goals for the races, and the challenges he faced during a recent holiday. He is aiming for a personal best in the half marathon and is considering pushing himself to achieve a sub-120 time. He also discusses his approach to the ultra marathon, which is more about completing the race than achieving a specific time. He is excited for the races and is looking forward to the challenge. Hello and welcome to episode number 18 of the Progress Pod. So, coming back from a holiday just last week, things have been a bit hectic, so no guest on the show today. It's just going to be me, myself. We do have a good few guests lined up across October and beyond, but today I'm going to be chatting through a wee bit of how I'm feeling, a wee update on where I'm at prior to two big events that are coming up over the next couple of weeks. So, we've got the Great Scottish Run Half Marathon on Sunday, and then I've got the Dunoon Ultra Marathon 55k a week on Saturday, so that's 7th of October. So, six days between the two events, events that I've been prepping for well over three months now, and I think it would be quite valuable just to give an insight as to how I've been training, how I'm feeling, what my goals are, what my plans are prior to it, and just a wee kind of update really in terms of where I'm at. So, training's been going really, really well. Specifically for the Half Marathon, I'm running faster than I've ever run. I think it was three or four weeks ago I logged my 5k PB and 10k PB in the one run, in the one 10k run. So, yeah, it just shows you that I'm running the best I ever have. Things were a bit tougher on a holiday, a week break. I was planning to run a bit more, and I really did struggle when I did run. It just, the different environment kind of threw me off a bit. Different climate. Nutrition obviously wasn't on point as it usually is. Like, sleep was different, it's a different sleeping environment, and I just found it really, really tough to hit the paces that I wanted to hit. And to be honest, I still got the runs ticked off, but it was a wee bit of a dampener to my confidence, which obviously I was a wee bit worried towards the end of the holiday. I was like, am I trying to bite off a bit more than I can chew here? After having a really, really good session before heading off on holiday. Jamie, who's been in the podcast before, myself and him went out on an 18k run. 6k at Half Marathon pace, 6k easier than 6k at Half Marathon pace, and it was in quite warm conditions, and we absolutely smashed it. We like, we blew it out of the water. And that gave me so much confidence, but I just was a wee bit of a nip on holiday, but having a think about everything, and like, I did one of my runs completely fasted. It just was, it wasn't ideal conditions, so I didn't let it get me down too much. And since being back, I've got straight back into the running. I actually ticked off a 30k run the day I got back, so that was a wee bit of a booster for the noon ultra. And then I did an 8k run straight at Half Marathon pace, which went pretty well, and I've kind of got that confidence back a bit. Right now, I'm in the taper week, where it's just a few easy pace runs, and the taper week does play mind games with you. You start thinking, should I be doing more here? Like, oh, I'm not going to be able to run the pace. Like, it does play mind games with you, but it is necessary. You want to be going into that run feeling as fresh as possible, legs feeling good. You don't want to be entering it with any sort of fatigue, and anybody that's trained for a Half Marathon, at any sort of running event, you'll notice that your legs are pretty heavy all the time. Like, there's just never really a point that you can say, my legs are really fresh. So, you want to avoid that. That's why with taper, we want to head in feeling as fresh as possible. And so, yeah, I'm in the middle of taper week. Now, I'm starting to kick in a wee bit, in terms of the goals for the Half Marathon. So, my Half Marathon PB at the moment is 124, and that's the ultimate aim, is to beat that. I want a PB on Sunday. Obviously, things come into consideration, in terms of weather and stuff like that. Who knows what that's going to be like, but I want a PB, and within training, I have been thinking about hitting that 120 mark, and you think it's four minutes, and you think, oh, you should be able to do that. Like, that's not too big a difference. See, at that pace, four minutes is massive. Like, four minutes is huge. So, it's, just to kind of give a perspective, a 124 PB, that is running at four minutes exactly per kilometre. If you want to get 120, just sub-120, you need to be hitting 345, three minutes 45 per kilometre. So, I have run faster than 345 for a good few of my runs, but, so for instance, 10k straight, I've done quicker than 345. The training session that me and Jamie did, doing 6k intervals, actually our last kilometre, the 18th kilometre on that, was 333 or something like that. So, I know that I can run at that pace, but I don't know if I can do it for 21 kilometres straight. So, that is the kind of predicament I'm in at the moment, whereas I do feel that I could maybe run at a 355. So, I feel that I could do a 355, 21 kilometres straight, which would get me a PB, but I'm so close to that 120, I'm thinking, do I just go out and push for it? So, in terms of my goals, like, I'm quite open. I know that some people like to keep their goals and their plans close to their chest. I'm quite open in publicly admitting what I'm going for. I might not get it, but this is what I'm going for. This is my goal, and I'm going to try everything I can to do it. So, I'm going to try and go for the 120 at the half marathon on Sunday. Obviously, as I said, there's lots of external factors. If it's going to be horrendous wind and rain, it's maybe going to hinder that, but I'm going to go for it anyway. Head out at 345 pace and just see what happens. If I get to 10, 11k and I think, right, there is absolutely no chance on earth that I'm going to sustain this for another 10k, then I'll just, I'll slow it down. I'll slow it down and hopefully still manage to grind out a PB, because what I don't want to do is I don't want to go out and just aiming for the PB, and then I get to the end of the race and think, I could have given more there. With a half marathon, I'm always of the view that, let's go for it. Half marathon, 10k, let's go for it. A marathon is a bit of a different kettle of fish. I would never advise anybody to go out on a marathon, like to go out hot and slow it down. The marathon's a different beast. It's so long that you don't want to be like, you'll burn out. And if you burn out at like 21k, you've still got 21k to go. It's not, it's a monster. So like half marathons, I would always say start off at a slower, steadier pace. And then if you've got more energy in the tank towards the end, push on. There's the argument to do that for the half marathon as well. But I'm going to go for it because I think a half marathon, if you get to that 10, 11, 12k mark, you're like, right, I've got 8k to go here. And you've got a chance of grinding that out. So I'm going to go for it. And we'll just see what happens in the day. I'm going to leave it all out there. And if I can get the 120, amazing. But then if I don't, hopefully I'll still win the other PB. So that is the goal for Sunday. Really, really big focus on it. Looking forward to it. Can't wait. There's 25 members of the Progress Project doing it as well. Whether it's the half marathon or 10k. So it's all set for a really, really good day. I'm absolutely buzzing for it. And so yeah, things are going well about the carb load tomorrow. And yeah, just feel loose. We've got a shakeout run Saturday morning as well. 4k, just loosen off the legs and then that'll be us ready to go on Sunday morning. And then it's going to be all eyes on the ultra. So I have to admit, the ultra has probably been secondary in terms of on my mind. Half marathon is coming first and half marathon is my biggest goal. I really want to have a strong PB there. But I signed up for the ultra marathon with a view of it's something I've never done before. I'm currently at my peak running fitness at the moment. Like I'm at peak fitness. So it's a good time. And I really want to tick off ultra marathon. I want to experience it. I want to go through it. And then I want to help others do an ultra marathon as well. So I want to get that experience ticked off. And it was a really, really good event as well in Dunoon. But to be honest, the training for that, I've not really done anything else with my half marathon training apart from make my longer runs longer. So typically in a half marathon block, your long runs, they're not going to go much above 18, 20k. Like you don't need to do much longer than that to manage the half marathon. But with me doing the ultra marathon, I've pushed up to 25k and 30k. Ideally, I would have done more, but it's just with my holidays and things like that, like it just hasn't worked out. And it's just, it's been a balancing act because I've not wanted to be too fatigued or putting too much pressure on the legs. Like if I went out and did a marathon, essentially like a 40k run, then I'm maybe not going to have the energy and the time to do my tempo runs and my quicker pace runs for the half marathon specific goal. So it's just been trying to get that balance right of yeah, getting some miles in the legs, getting the long distances in to prepare for the ultra, but ultimately having the half marathon is the main focus is that's coming first and that's, that's where I really want to be. So the ultra marathon, I have to say, has been a bit in the background, but come next week, it's going to be the forefront and I'm just going to need to go with it and what I've got, but it's going to be a completely different approach. Like I'm going to be taking it slow, going to be taking it steady and the aim is just going to be to complete that. I'm not going out with a set time in mind, like it's probably the first run I think I've ever done where in terms of an event that I'm not going out to say, I want to try and complete this in this time. I'm just going to go there, see how I feel after the half marathon, obviously it's only six days later and just go and run, take it, take it easy, get through it and just, just get that experience of an ultra marathon. It's going to be different. I've spoken to a lot of people who've done ultras and it's like a lot of them say like walk up the uphills and run the flats and things like that. That's like quite alien to me. Any event I've ever done, I'm always like pretty much going, going at it hard. Like the thought of walking is just like, it just had never crossed my mind, but this is a completely different ball game and one, one thing I'm excited for. So yeah, looking forward to it in terms of approach next week, it's really just going to see how Sunday goes. Monday, Tuesday is going to be just a lot of recovery, stretching, rolling. And then again, it's probably going to be another couple of easy runs next week just to keep the legs loose. There's not going to be any 40K, 30K runs in there. I'm just going to have to go with what I've got. And then we'll see how there's quite a lot of hills. There's quite a lot of downhills in the Dunoon course and yeah, 55K, longest I've ever done, but really, really excited to get that ticked off. There's going to be a lot of food being consumed from tomorrow until probably next Sunday. In terms of food, I'll be ramming in the carbs and on the lead up to the half marathon, because I'm going to burn through glycogen like nothing else on Sunday with the pace that I'm going to be aiming for. And then it's going to be a case of getting the food in to recover. And then it's going to be another big carb load in the lead up to the Dunoon Ultra. And then after that, I'm going to need to really refuel after around 55K. So yeah, I'm excited for the food element and I've already covered carb loading on a previous podcast, but that's about to start tomorrow. So over the next week or two, it's going to be a big, big, big push. Two big events to be working towards. Two big events I actually cannot wait for. And myself and one of our coaches in the industry, Thomas Nisbet, we are both doing the Dunoon Ultra. So myself and him are likely going to grab a podcast together and chat through how it went, chat through experiences, his first Ultra as well. So that's going to be a good podcast to keep an eye out for. But yeah, just wanted to give a wee update in terms of where I'm at in terms of body, how I'm feeling. I'm feeling really, really good. On holiday, obviously, things were a bit more relaxed, but we've got straight back into things in terms of nutrition, training, lots of stretching has been going on, lots of foam rolling. I'm feeling really, really good at the moment. No niggles, nothing like that. Touch wood. So fingers crossed things stay that way and it's a good run on Sunday and then into the Ultra. So yeah, just thought that'd be quite useful. A wee insight in terms of where I'm at, what my goals are, what I've been training like, what I've been doing, what my plans are. You guys, hopefully anyone listening who's maybe got a running event coming up can take some value from it. So yeah, just another wee couple of points. If anybody is in East Kilbride or round about that area and is doing the Great Scottish Run on Sunday, we are doing a big shakeout run on Saturday morning, 8.30 at Sprout Cafe in East Kilbride. And it's going to be a 4K, really, really easy pace, just a wee way to kind of loosen off the legs prior to the event on Sunday. Also a way just for everybody to kind of meet up, kind of get rid of some of the nerves because the nerves can play havoc. So it's just a way of meeting up, any last minute questions, advice. And if you are doing the Great Scottish Run and you are listening to this and you want to come along, make sure to come along, reach out to me on Instagram or whatever and message below here in the comments and get yourself along because it'll be a really, really good run. And yeah, looking forward to the events and you'll hear a recap of both the Half Marathon and the Ultra in the coming weeks. So hopefully you enjoyed this podcast and as usual, anybody you know who would maybe benefit from listening, get it shared, share it to your story and we'll speak to you on the next one.