A week digested, with snow

Add in a royal flush and all in all it was a good week. I'll get on with writing my book later

Lila up on Dartmoor.

This week, while working at the Guardian, I edited its Digested Read series, and it struck me as an interesting format for a Monday Musings. So, since there’s no time like the present and all that, here’s my past week, digested …

Monday

What to write my Monday Musings about? After dropping Ossian off at school, getting home, having coffee, wasting a little too much time on social media, I had to come up with something quick. What had I been up to? How about those 5K times I posted on Threads? I can throw in my story of the 5K time trial when I was a teenager. Bingo! A couple of hours later it was in the bag, beautified and hurtling off across the internet to inboxes everywhere.

Feeling a bit guilty about telling everyone, in my Musings, that I’d sacked off last week’s Sunday long run, and having got myself geed up about running a fast 5K sometime soon, I pulled on my running gear and headed out for a 40-minute shimmy around the nearby lanes. My week was officially started.

Tuesday

My eldest daughter is home from university and today was deadline day for two big essays, and since she had a professional subeditor in the house, she got me to look over her essays for grammar, sense etc. All well and good, but I had a book to write. But surely my daughter’s education was important too? I thought I’d give it a quick once-over, but it took me hours, partly because I got a little too interested in the subject matter - one was about John Waters movies, and the other about deepfake videos. By the time I was done asking questions, making suggestions, my book-writing window was fast closing. Still, I have until the end of May to finish it. I’m sure I won’t be panicking come mid-May and wishing I’d done more when I still had time. There’s no chance of that.

The evening brought a speed session with the local Torbay Triathlon Club, which this week was a 5-mile time trial. They do this regularly, but I wasn’t quite in the mood for it this week. I didn’t feel particularly fast, and running flat out for just over 30 minutes seemed a little daunting. So I decided, to make it more palatable, that I would do it as a progression run - so getting faster the whole way (or at least, for each mile to be faster than the previous one).

Jon, the coach, a sparky, wiry man in his mid-50s from Southport who is a brilliant runner, gathered me up with him and about five others in the second-fastest group - they start with the slower runners going off first, with the idea that we’ll all finish at roughly the same time. I was running in my usual group, but as I was planning to get faster the whole way, I obviously had to keep some powder dry in the first few miles, so it was a real effort to sit back and let the guys I usually run with tear off ahead of me.

I had a big urge to bin my progression run idea and to tuck back in to the group. But no, this was going to be a lesson in patience, I decided. Could I sit off the pace and come flying past everyone, feeling - and looking - amazing, at the end?

I remember in Kenya how gradually, almost imperceptibly, they would increase the pace on their progression runs. On Tuesday, mine was a little more, how shall I put it … jerky. I’d settle into a pace (the first mile was just under seven minutes), and then my watch would beep for the end of the mile and I’d jolt up a level suddenly to a faster pace. Rather than a gradual progression, it was more like a step-up progression.

The trick was making the step up big enough for the next mile to be definitely faster, but at the same time leaving room for further increases. I just about managed it. Luckily the fourth beep, signalling the start of the final mile, occurred at the start of a short downhill section, so I could really let rip, and then I just had to hang on until the end.

I didn’t look or feel as easy and powerful as I’d hoped along that final section, but was instead just as raggedy and tired as when I run the whole thing flat out. However, I was going faster, that’s for sure, with the last mile run in 5:54.

The Marathon Talk podcast (remember that?) used to talk about progression runs, and when people nailed it, with each mile getting faster, they’d call it “a royal flush”. The perfect result. The Strava graph afterwards was inordinately satisfying and I couldn’t help sharing it online the next day. I know you’re dying to see it too, so here it is below. Yes, I felt pretty pleased with that …