I now have a fourteen week plan which I am really pleased with, fourteen weeks because that’s when the Kilomathon is on. My training for the great north run was not structured at all. I would head out and run the distance that I felt like, and then get injured because I pushed myself too hard to quickly, then sit out for a few weeks while I waited for the pain to go away. This time I am going to build the distances sensibly. The plan itself is pretty straight forward.

Monday. Rest.
Tuesday. Pace run or hill run, alternating each week.
Wednesday. Rest.
Thursday Easy run.
Friday. Squash.
Saturday. Cycle and Swim.
Sunday big run.

The Tuesday run will either be a short 4 mile run with some high speed running thrown in, or I will tackle a hill. The Thursday easy run will be a nice casual jog with the wife (who also has a Owain devised 14 week plan, though her goals are slightly different to mine). Friday night squash is something different, using different muscles and exerting the cardio in a different way to distance running. Saturday morning will be a cycle to and from the swimming baths (about 6 miles) and then a 60 minute swim. And the Sunday big run will see me increase my mileage each week until by the time I reach week twelve I will cover the 16 miles of the kilomathon.

Last week’s squash was looking more promising, I have a few shots that are starting to test my dad and we are having more of a game of it now. I just need more practice, I am thinking in the long term I might consider joining a squash league.

The Saturday cycle and swim was surprisingly knackering. Riding to the baths was fine, it was all downhill. I then used the hour to work on my freestyle stroke. I am a convert to the Total Immersion technique, though it is going to take some time and practice before I have a strong freestyle stroke that will see me around a mile of open water swimming.
Cycling back out of town was slightly more arduous as it was pretty much all uphill and my legs were fried after the swimming. It has given me more of a desire to become a tri-athlete though.

Sunday big run. I was driven 6 miles away from home, and then ran back. It was really nice at 9am in the morning running through town. It was cool but I have winter running clothes now which made for a comfortable run.

Damage today? Surprisingly not much. I had achy calves from last weeks Wednesday run which were still tight for the squash, swimming and the Sunday big run, but I did stretch to warm down, and spent the rest of Sunday chilling my boots and today I am in surprisingly little pain. Feet hurt from blisters but nothing that time in the trainers can’t get rid of.

I went running properly last night for the first time since the Great North Run all the way back in September. I have kept myself pretty active in the intervening eight weeks with swimming and squash while I waited for the doctor to give me the nod, but I can’t believe how much my running fitness has fallen off. The blisters I accept were likely as my feet have got soft but the deep muscle ache that I have this morning was a bit of a surprise.

This run was a bit of a get back into the swing of it run so I ran an easy pace, 4 miles in about 40 minutes about 6 miles an hour, I wasn’t really watching the clock this time so no exact mph’s today.

I have got to be more structured and set myself less damaging targets if I am going to avoid a recurrence of the shin pain, so I am going to put together a more strict plan with a less rapid increase in distance. My target is to be race fit for the killerthon in March, and my cunning plan is to work out a training schedule working back from 14th March to now, building in mileage increments and some tapering at the end. My goal to complete the 16.3 mile event in about 2 hours 30 minutes, that’s averaging over 6 miles an hour for the distance which is something I am confident I can achieve after doing the half mary at that sort of pace, and with some structured training this time I think I will manage the extra distance.

These updates are getting later and later but I was waiting to see what the doctor said.

Friday night was squash night. 50 minutes and I was pretty knackered, it is less tiring every week I go and I’m not sure if it is because I am getting better at the game and am not running around the court so much or whether it is because I am getting fitter. Either way, by 50 minutes I was loosing concentration and was playing some awful shots. How long before I can give my dad a run for his money?...

Anyway, I finally went to the doctor last night to discuss my shonky shins and foot. The foot is a simple body part and there is very little to go wrong with it. In this instance my foot is probably bruised and it can take six to eight weeks to feel right again. So put up and shut up with the foot pain then.

The shin is not broken. There is no damage to the bones as far as the doctor can see and he is more than happy for me to start running again. He is convinced that I am suffering from Anterior Compartment Syndrome and it is something that I can train around, and with help and advice I can reduce the likelihood that I will suffer the pain again. He suggests joining a running club, which I am not sure about, and I have to warm up and warm down properly.

I have a couple of events that I will be taking part in for 2010 already booked. The Kilomathon on the 14th March, and I have now booked myself to take part in the Great East Swim which is 19th of June. (Talking about the Great Swims, they are being shown on telly at the moment on Sunday mornings at 8am on channel 4. Great North Swim is on 13th December so watch it and you might see me. Maybe.) There are a few other events I have espied and I might end up with quite a full event diary next year to make up for the fact that I won’t be taking part in the DW yet.

With events booked, and the all clear from the Doc, I am feeling the motivation to train again. Tonight I will start with a short street run to get back into it.

I was saving my blog update for today because I wanted to write about what the doctor said… Only he didn’t say anything, at least to me. I missed my appointment like a feckless idiot. New appointment made for next Monday, so hopefully I will be unleashed on to the streets again soon.

Friday night squash was another thrashing. I’m getting better though and managed to score 4 points in one game. We played for an hour and it was pretty knackering. I have also started to develop a new injury which seems to manifest itself when playing squash. The top of my foot hurts like a bruise, and is really painful by the time we finished. I was going to mention this to the doctor but as I already said, I missed the appointment.

Swimming on Saturday was pretty half arsed as well. It was my birthday over the weekend so I wasn’t really in the mood for doing anything other than chilling out. I tried to master this Total Immersion Swimming technique but it’s harder than the book implies and I ended up doing some rather lame lengths. Next weekend I will give it a more thorough go.

Another weekly report. I have slumped into a lack of training hole here at the moment. No direction, bad weather, dark nights and Modern Warfare 2 has seen my physical activity reduced to just two efforts a week.

Friday night was squash night, 40 minutes played pretty much. This didn’t hurt half as much as it did the first time last week and I don’t ache at all today. I also scored some points this week my best game I was only thrashed 3 – 9. I am thinking of sneakily hiring a squash court to spend the time practicing serving to myself as I give the advantage back too often despite some heroic play.

Swimming Saturday. 1.1 miles covered (54 lengths) in 50 minutes. But I think for the short term this will be the last session of just doing lengths for swimming’s sake. I have taken internet advice and have started investigating the Total Immersion swimming technique. I am only at chapter 2 of the book but it seems that I can swim faster and further with a different technique, so I think next week I will be focusing whatever drills the book suggests.

My training has really become a weekend affair with the nights closing in and it getting colder and more unpleasant out. Also with my leg x-ray coming up I don’t want to start putting in long runs in on the off chance that I make something appear worse than it is. But that’s not to say that I am not doing anything and I have an ache today, the likes of which I haven’t experienced for a while.

Wednesday morning I woke early, and rather than lounge in bed watching breakfast news, I went for a run. My running is being kept to a minimum and I was only out for about half an hour.

Friday night will now see a new element being added to the cross training, Squash. This brutal game is the reason why every muscle in my body aches like agony today. My dad used to play a lot of squash a few years ago, and I played when I was at school too, so I thought it would be easy to have a semi-competitive game once a week.
Turns out our skill levels are separated by some margin and I spent most of the time thrashing thin air or hitting the ball outside the game area while my dad patiently talked me through some of the finer points on how to play.
No matter. I improved toward the end and was able to get some control of the shots, with a little practice I will be brilliant at this game.
Squash is not like distance running which is a sort of continuous load on the muscles and cardio systems. Squash is 50% standing around 50% explosive energy and I was knackered. I had worked up a massive sweat after ten minutes, and was close to fainting at one point. We played for about an hour and it really took it’s toll. My left hand (the hand with the racket) aches, and my left deltoid feels a little tighter from my enthusiastic swinging at the ball. But every other muscle in my body has been tight and yesterday I struggled to move at all.

Saturday saw the continuation of the weekend swim. I’m loving this at the moment. 52 lengths swum this Saturday (I intend to increase the number of laps each week) with more distance with the front crawl. I’m finding that I am running out of energy while doing front crawl after about a length, I sort of feel out of breath and my arms start to flail about a bit. I don’t know if it because my breathing technique is bad or that I don’t have enough stamina in my arms. Either way I am going to have to keep on putting the lengths in.

I seem to be getting down to a weekly update rather than a daily at the moment which is a reflection on the slightly scaled back training I was doing. It is now going back up a gear because I have something to aim for.

Last week midweek (I think Wednesday… Quickly checks twitter updates… Yes. Wednesday) I was up early and went for a quick run. I convinced the wife to come with me as she is a little slower than me and would keep my pace to a slower which would be less damaging to my legs. It was only half an hour but it was nice, no strains or pains.

Saturday we went swimming again. I think this is going to become a regular thing as we are both getting a lot out of it at the moment. I wanted to swim a minimum of a mile while we were there so I set off counting lengths. I needed to swim 50 of them and had managed that after about 50 minutes. I don’t quite know why I was slower than for the Great North Swim, maybe I stopped more often than I thought to talk to the wife. I don’t know but I’m not going to worry about it too much, I have plenty of time to work up to the speed I want to achieve for next years great north swim.

The weather on Sunday was looking pretty atrocious so I shoehorned a kayak trip into the Saturday afternoon. An hour on the water was good, after the swim it was hard work on the arms and I really felt the aches in my back and chest muscles on Sunday.

I am now putting together a week long fitness plan for me and the wife that will be set in stone, with the condition that we will do everything set out on the plan each and every day and we had better have a phenomenally good reason for not doing each days plan. I had a plan with the Whitehouse gym that Fitness Stu put together for me ages ago, and I suppose I could go back to that, but that would involve actually going to the gym which was a pain in the arse after work mid-week.

The new race I have to train for. Someone I follow on twitter suggested a Kilomarathon. 26 kilometres (instead of miles as you would get in a normal marathon) which works out to be about 16 odd miles. I have just signed up for it so now I am pretty much committed to training. Minor worry about what the doctor said about anterior compartment syndrome but I’m sure I’ll be able to find a way to run around the problem by March 14th.