Week 5 — Quiet Progress, Finding the Rhythm & Homemade gels
Week 5 was pretty dull and boring… and that’s exactly why it felt like a good week.
For the first time in a while, the training genuinely resembled a full week of work. Seven days, seven touchpoints with the process. Not seven big sessions, not seven “hero” workouts, just regular contact with training. Four bike rides, three runs, and two strength sessions. Two of those bike rides were only around 30 minutes long, but at this stage even that matters. It’s still more aerobic work than I was doing before, and it all counts toward rebuilding the base.
The overall structure stayed exactly where it should be. Three runs, no more, no less. One treadmill attempt at a quality session, one genuinely easy run, and one longer run with some controlled work inside it. The bike sessions sat around that structure to support it rather than compete with it.
The first run of the week was K Reps interval session on the treadmill. Controlled, repeatable, and reasonably sensible pitching in between 3:37 & 3:41. The focus wasn’t on chasing speed but on reintroducing rhythm and getting comfortable running harder again. It felt fine ish……. not sharp, not too laboured, just another step back in touch with harder and faster running.
The second run was a very easy social trail run with the wife, looping up over the golf course on the downs. Plan was a longish out and back with all the climbing in the first half but a herd of cows blocking the way put pay to that idea about 4k into it, i would have quite happily jogged on through but it wasn’t worth the bickering :). Pace was largely irrelevant and effort was dictated by the terrain. The run did exactly what it needed to do. It stayed aerobic, kept the legs moving, and added volume without adding stress. Runs like that are easy to undervalue, but they’re often the glue that holds weeks together.
The long run was the most informative session of the week. It included four blocks of ten minutes at a cruise or tempo effort, all done by feel with no watch-gawping. That was a conscious choice. I wanted to avoid chasing numbers and instead let effort dictate pace. When I looked afterward, all four blocks came in under goal three-hour marathon pace…..just, which is encouraging but it comes with an important caveat.
Those efforts never felt troubling, but they also weren’t super trivial. There’s still a long way to go before anything like that becomes repeatable over meaningful marathon distances. For now, it’s just a useful marker that the direction of travel is right, not a green light to push harder.
Strength training stayed consistent again this week, with two solid sessions reinforcing the basics. Nothing flashy, nothing clever just doing the work that makes everything else possible.
The bike work played its role quietly. Four rides across the week, two of them short 30-minute spins, but all of them adding aerobic volume without impact. This is exactly how the bike is meant to function in this project supporting my running, not stealing from it.
I also trialled my homemade Maurten-style hydro gel during the longer bike session and again on the long run. Both went smoothly. No gut issues, no surprises, and a fairly significant cost saving compared to relying on commercial gels. I calculated a saving of about £30 per box of 12 gels using almost identical ingredients.
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from Week 5 wasn’t any single session, but how the week felt overall. I felt pretty decent for most of it. Not flying, not invincible, just settled. That sense of slipping into a training groove where sessions don’t feel like an intrusion into life, but part of it.
That’s often where progress starts to happen. Quietly, without announcement.
New trainers also arrived this week, ready to be tested next week. A foray into the world of Li-ning !
Week 5 added another layer of consistency and right now, that’s exactly what this project needs.
Rolling into week 6 feeling like i have completed some decent work.
Cheers
Si
