Hills, Hills and more Hills

Well, it is no surprise that we are spending more and more time on the hills as we focus in on the Speed of Light. On Monday evening we headed to Arthur’s seat for a date with Katri Walker. Katri is a visual artist and filmmaker that has been commissioned to do a piece on The Speed of Light and it was to this end that Katri accompanied us on the hill.

We decided that this training exercise was going to be to run our respective original routes as a continuous run, that way if we could do that then the fitness should be OK when we incorporated the actions. So after meeting up with Katri in the car park we headed off to our starting positions – a gentle 1 mile warm-up. The plan was simple, Katri was going to accompany me on the first three legs and then hook up with Moira for her final legs. Katri was full of questions and the time passed very quickly. I would like to say I didn’t notice the steep inclines but I wouldn’t quite go that far! Just for the record, my ankle felt the best it has been since the injury coming off the hill.

On Tuesday it was back to leading our JogScotland group, it was to be everyone’s favourite session, not! Grassy Hill reps. Has to be said that we must be going soft as we gave the group options – 6 reps, at least 2 of which had to be long. To our surprise many opted for more than 2 long reps – obviously there is still a belief that – no pain, no gain.

On Wednesday, The Jammys were back on the road, this time the destination was Inverness, the Highland capital. Inverness has always been a great hunting ground for the Jammys and this year proved no exception. The Jammys won best workplace group and JammyBilly was second male and JammyMo was third female. It is a long way to go for a 5k but the trip is a tremendous team building occasion.

After the long trip and arrival back in Edinburgh in the ‘wee sma hours in the morning’, Thursday’s run round the Innocent railway, in the shadow of Arthur’s seat was a somewhat subdued affair. Nobody cared to divert to Hunter’s bog and take in more hills. In the evening, Moira and I had a much-needed sports massage.

The planned middle distance run for Friday didn’t materialise, what with the rain and my ankle grumbling we thought it prudent to give the run a miss.  On Saturday, I had planned to do parkrun but again I felt my ankle was just not right so again declined to run.

The problem with our training of late has been the lack of long runs, usually Sunday is the day for long runs but with the intrusion of the Kilomathon, Speed of light and the Marathon the long run has become a distant memory. However, that was put to right on Sunday with a hilly Harburn 10 miler. The price to pay, well apart from being sluggish, I collected a huge blister on my right foot. My own fault really, went back to using my old Asics and re-introduced the orthotics. Lesson learnt – don’t fix what ain’t broken!