Ready to go.

Yet again my stair training for this week mirrored the sessions from the previous week and based on the results I reckon I'm as ready as i can be.  I felt a slight niggle in my right shin on Wednesday so rather than let it develop into something I booked a massage with Sports Med Ireland and had that today.  Low mileage for this week but I don't mind as my training has been fairly consistent since Christmas and at this time of year I'm usually in a state of semi hibernation which means less time training and more time eating..

Almost there.

Finished off the week today with a 21 mile run joined by Tony Brennan. We didn't plan the route and just ran so it was a very enjoyable morning. I've decided not to Taper for the ESBRU as the trip to New York will be costing me training time so rather than have two low mileage weeks i'll try to keep next week as normal as possible but I will reduce the intensity of my stair climbing sessions. Mileage for this week was 59.5 miles plus the stair climbing so all in all a good week. In normal circumstances I would taper for the ESBRU but because the Celtic 100K is so close I can't afford to miss 2 weeks of training or more importantly can't miss the long runs.

Is the lift out of order?

It was this day last week that I did my first stair climbing session in Liberty Hall so I decided to do a similar session today and compare my times per rep along with Heart Rate average and Max. It was a tough session but the results show that I've made big improvents since day 1. My fastest climb on day one was 2mins 11 secs with Hr avg of 155 and max of 163. Today my fastest rep was 1min 38 sec with Hr avg of 141 and max of 154. My Hr avg and max did increase as the session went on but it does show signs of improvement. My text session on the stairs will be 10 or more reps during which i'll try to keep an even 2min pace and from that i'll try to work out a HR zone for race day.
Meeting Tony later for a Hill session..

How will I fit it all in?

I mentioned that the Empire State Building Race was bad timing even though I'm delighted to be doing it but just before I got the invitation I also found out about a 100K race in Galway on March 28th and I had already commited to a 100K trail race in May. I'd been searching for a 100K road race for quite a while as i need a qualifyer time for another planned future event so when this one came up I couldn't refuse.
Then the following month I'm running the Wicklow Way Ultra as a last long training run before my 100K race in Australia on May 15th and the following weekend I'm travelling to London for the London Marathon. So to summarise, I've got the ESBRU on Feb 03rd followed by the Celtic 100K on March 28th, then it's the Wicklow Way Ultra and London Marathon in April and then it's The North Face 100K in Australia in May. Now I've no problem covering the distances but to run them competitevly requires event specific training so my ESBRU stair climbing sessions are costing me long runs and my long road runs for the Celtic 100K are costing me long trail / mountain runs in preparation for the race in Australia.
My plan for the moment is to train for the Celtic 100K and substitute 1 or 2 fast runs with stair climbing sessions. I was looking at last years ESBRU on youtube and from doing some research on the event it sounds like I could be positioned mid pack because I don't have any stair climbing experience so there's no point in giving this event 100% when I won't get the chance to compete at 100%. I will however train hard and still give it 100% on the day.
My goal race is the one in Australia so everything I do between now and then will be leading towards this event.

Empire State Building Run Up

At the end of last week I received an invitation to take part in the annual race up the Empire State Building which is organised by the New york Road Runners.  In some ways it's bad timing because of other racing commitments but I couldn't and didn't refuse as it's one of those once in a lifetime opportunities (another one).  With less than 3 weeks to prepare and taper I gained access to the tallest building in Dublin 'Liberty Hall' and had my first training on wednesday of this week.  Liberty Hall is 15 floors high with 300 steps in comparison to the Empire State Building which has 1572 steps over 82 runnable floors (actual height 102 floors).  My first session which was during my lunch break was a trial run to help with compiling a fairly short but intense training programme and consisted of 4 climbs at an average of 2 min 15 sec per rep.  It was quite tough and to be honest it was a lot tougher than I expected but it after the first climb it seemed to get easier I think??  Recovered fairly quickly and finished the day with my running buddy Tony Brennan from Le Cheile A.C with a few hill sprints.

The following day I hit Liberty Hall again with the plan of running 10 sets at 2min 30 sec pace but felt so good I ran most efforts at close to 2 mins with the fastest being 1 min 54.  

Today Saturday I met with Tony for our usual Interval session on the Le Cheile Track and we ran 6* 800M at 3min which is 6 min mileing and comfortably fast.