It started so well. Well, it didn’t really. The small knee issue that marred the long run on Sunday of week 1 has carried into Week 2. More on that later!

Week 2’s training kicked off with a rest day followed by an easy run, some indoor cycling, a threshold run, a couple more days of cross training / rest and then a Sunday long run.

The first easy run actually went really quite smoothly with very little pain at all. It’s such a great feeling running without too much pain for the first time since November. Spoiler, it wasn’t to last. The cycling on Wednesday was smooth enough, it feels good to be getting the legs spinning again after not really riding since the summer. Clearly there’s a long way to go fitness wise but it’s nice to get going again. There was also a little bit of a strength session courtesy of having to move 1000kg of wood pellet…

Thursday’s run was, unfortunately where things started to break down, Garmin prescribed a threshold run. With intervals at threshold pace. Of course, it glossed over what threshold pace is, so if you’re thinking of giving the Garmin marathon training plan a go, you’ll need to use an online calculater to find out what it will be.

The calculator that I tend to use is the Jack Daniels (no, not that one!) VDOT calculator. Stick your best recent time over a distance and it’ll pull out the training paces for you.

Anyway back to the threshold intervals. The warm up, that was fine, lovely. The first interval actually went quite easily. The second one. Well, the second was where the knee started to get sore. In an altogether too common occurance I pushed through and limped my way through the last two sets. Not a good idea. Not a good idea at all.

Friday was a rest day, thankfully, as walking about was somewhat of a struggle. Saturday there was a lot of focussed stretching and mobility work to try and help counter my own stupidity. Then came Sunday. Sunday morning the knee was actually feeling fair so we headed out for our Sunday long run. We decided to head down to Krasnik with it’s 3.5km loops. This meant if there was an issue I could pull out and it not be too far to the car.

Expecting there to be an issue the road bike and associated kit was chucked in the back of the car. This came in so handy as before the first lap was up the knee had flared up again. So, back to the car it was, get swapped over into bike gear and then finished my workout on the bike. The good thing about this was that Gabi was able to finish her run without disruption.

As for the Garmin training plan, it was pretty good this week. The easy session was, well, easy. The Interval session was, whilst horrifically unsuccesful for me, short enough to make it managable, even with lower fitness. The long run was a progression from 3x20mins of last week to 3×25 minutes again a managable increase. The walking breaks would make the 90 minute run feel a little bit easier.

Now we’re on to week three, which means that it’s three months to go. There’s now a bit of a scrabble to try and get the knee sorted. Hopefully consistent yoga, mobility and strength will pull things around but who knows. There might be an awful lot of biking going on in the near future! If you’ve got a great fix for ITB issues, please do let us know in the comments below.

Let’s see what this week brings us!