I have a Nike t-shirt with saying on the front “running fast ain’t easy”. It’s a super old shirt, at least 7 years old, and whilst I hate to agree with anything Nike have to say (or do), they ain’t wrong!

I decided last week that I was going to try to get faster. I’ve made this decision before and not followed through. I just thought, well I’ll try harder on race day, but it turns out you actually need to put in a lot of work to get faster.

I feel like I’ve been “base building” since I started running 14 odd years ago. I take most of my runs easy, I do what I ‘feel’ like and that mostly involves running with my dogs, plodding along on the trails and signing up for the occasional race. I love it, it’s the favourite part of my day, but it’s not helping me improve.

That’s not to say that I haven’t improved over the years, but I think that is mostly due to building the endurance engine and making better race day decisions. It’s certainly not because I have been putting in the speed or hill work required to improve.

I also had coaches this entire time. I just didn’t do what was prescribed.

So I thought, if I’m really serious about getting faster and putting in the work then I need to get a coach whose plan I will follow and who I know will check in and make sure I’m doing what I’m told. Problem is running coaches don’t grow on trees, not legitimate ones anyway. There are heaps of athletes and influencers who call themselves coaches and have no degrees, experience or certifications and then there are all the ‘popular’ coaches who seem to have what I’m looking for but are either so expensive that it’s prohibitive, they only take on elite athletes or they haven’t responded to my emails.

So for now, I’m going solo and I have pretty much no idea what I’m doing.

I started this week with a vague plan. I wanted to add in some strength work, which I’m easing back into after Tarawera, with the goal being one upper and one lower session during the week and two running workouts, one ‘intensity’ and one ‘endurance’. I figured the rest could just be ‘easy’.

I also usually plan my rest days around the days when I have a quick turnout with my shifts at work. When I finish at 9pm and have to be back there at 7am. It means I tend to have crappy sleep and get home at 4:30-5pm the second day absolutely wrecked and not wanting to do very much except maybe walk the dogs. I used to push through these and some days I will do an easy 5-6km run but I certainly don’t want to put any sort of ‘workout’ on those days.

That was as far as my planning got.

I went digging through an old training plan and selected a random interval style workout to see where the fitness was. The short answer, in the toilet.

I took the pups for a run as the warm up, switched shoes to the carbon ones (as if that was going to help somehow) and got started on 5 x 2 minutes at 4:50-5 min pace with a one minute recovery shuffle at 6 min pace in between. 4:50 pace shouldn’t feel super hard for me but it bloody did.

The Warby Trail Fest was schedule for the long weekend but so was an insane heatwave. I really wanted to go. I find it so much easier to do my long run when it’s supported and there are other people around and the Tour de Trails events are always so good.

I wanted to support them but was extremely cautious of the heat as well as having to get up early to get to the start, usually my biggest obstacle for racing. I left signing up to the very last minute. Running trails in the heat is usually a pretty terrible idea. You risk getting caught in a bush fire, running out of water, stepping on a snake and if it’s windy, having to dodge falling trees. It’s all a bit sketchy and to be honest, if it was anyone other than the team at Tour de Trails, I wouldn’t have even considered it. With some precautions in place such as an earlier start time, re-routed course and icy poles on course (woot!), I signed up the day before the race and headed down bright and early to the 27k Redwood Rush. I didn’t do a race recap last year, so I’ll do one this year with all the info about the course etc.

Long story short, I survived (it was super hot) and ticked that box of getting my long run done. It was actually a perfect course for a long run for what I’m training for (surf coast trail mara and Taupo 100) because it’s really runnable. I managed to take about 2 minutes off my time from last year. It was hotter and I didn’t have my mates to run with, which I think makes it way harder, so I’m pretty stoked with that. Its annoying Warburton is so far away that it breaks my windscreen rule (you don’t stare at the windscreen longer than you do the run).

I just bought Jason Koop’s training book so hopefully I can work out what workout to do this week before it’s too late.