Matt Gets Running

Yup, as you can see by the scene behind the scary, wonky-sunglassed weirdo in the pic­ture, it was a really nice day today. And I went on a route through Leigh Woods, which was gorgeous.

Not con­tent with doing the 8K through the woods like I did last time, going out along the towpath, up the steep climb into the woods, and back across to Clifton Vil­lage over the Sus­pen­sion Bridge, I also added in a little loop of the Downs.

And there­fore set a new per­sonal dis­tance record, with a 12K route. I decided to stop run­ning at bang on 12K, mostly because that was the upper limit I’d set myself — I didn’t want to go bey­ond 20% of my pre­vi­ous max — and partly because that gave me a nice five-minute cool-down walk to the little view­ing plat­form by the Sus­pen­sion Bridge, where I stretched for a while with some nice scenery to look at.

My hip felt fine. Everything, in fact, still feels pretty good. And it’s very good to know that I can do 12K includ­ing about 200m of total ver­tical climb, because that should make run­ning 10K on the flat a doddle in May.

About the only thing I did dif­fer­ently from nor­mal today was to use a rehyd­rat­ing addit­ive thingy in my water — I guess it adds a few things that you lose in sweat that nor­mal water doesn’t have — and I ate a pack of some kind of car­bo­hydrate gel goo, which said “three ber­ries” on the side and tasted mainly of chem­ic­als, from what I remem­ber, on the way across the Sus­pen­sion Bridge.

I think these prob­ably helped to some degree, but I think I could still have man­aged 12K without them. I fig­ure I should start exper­i­ment­ing with these things, as if I find some­thing that really gives me a notice­able energy boost when I’m flag­ging a bit, then it’ll help a lot for race day…