Running in the time of COVID

Yeah seriously surreal stuff these days....From a running point of view I am running at 7 am in the morning , doing 5 miles, back by 7.45 am. Then it's a case of minding Iseult while my wife works in the study. Schools are closed and I suspect they will be until September. I am doing ok with juggling minding Iseult and trying to teach remotely. I do the latter with a mixture of google classroom, email, Zoom and trying to learn as I go along. It's important the young people are kept busy. Hopefully they get to sit their state exams and have some sense of normality in the middle of this weirdness. From a teaching and learning point of view it isn't ideal but we can only commit and do our best.

I did see some moron teachers complaining on twitter about how hard it is to work from home. Maybe they should try unemployment or even try working more than 22 hours a week. Most teachers are great but there is a sense of self entitlement  and self pity in the profession which really gives teachers a bad name.

Anyway back to the running. I assume there won't be a marathon or a race of any description this year at all. I know a lot of marathons have been re-scheduled to September and October but realistically will they go ahead? I'm not sure but for the sake of sanity lets pretend they are and train accordingly. That said we might not be able to leave the house in a few months so I could be reduced to running laps of the back garden. I have taken up skipping as well!!

Currently I am training for a imaginary half marathon in a few weeks. Since last week I try to do 5 miles 3 days a week and 7 miles on a Saturday. I ran 5 miles yesterday and 5.5 miles today. Ideally I would like to be up to 4 X 7 miles a week and a long run of 13 miles on the weekend.  I'm not doing any speed work just simple running. The running I am enjoying. It's gives me a target to aim for and sets me up for the day.

starting point

4 weeks since the Donadea 50km.....I had pondered the crazy notion (for me) of running another marathon at some stage before the Dublin marathon in October. I have since ditched that idea as it's probably better I try to re-learn how to run faster and more consistently. I will have to start working on the latter part first before I even try to undertake the former.

Last week was ok, this week less so. 27 miles last week with 4 runs in the week. The longest run was a pacy 9 miler at 7.50 pace. I was happy with that. This week was 2 X 7 milers in Cork on the Wednesday and Thursday. I had to skip the Kinvara 13.1 on Saturday as a series of late nights on weekdays and a particularly late night on Friday night/ Saturday night (Pub table quiz) had me nackered over the weekend. As a result I was lying on the couch over the weekend feeling pretty gammy and tired. (By the way it was tiredness not that fecking COVID 19 b/s). Any way no run over the weekend.

I see that a number of Continental marathons are being postponed or deffered so it's best to wait before I commit to any larger local races yet.

I know I have failed to make 4 marathons in the last two years so the target in Dublin will be modest. Get the training done and get to the start line. Then again it may not go ahead anyway.