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On the foam roller

Miscellaneous,

One week to go until my first race of the year – the Château-Thierry 24 hour next Saturday/Sunday.

Other than a 7 mile and 10km race late last year, I haven’t raced since the Roubaix 28 hour in September and I am really looking forward to getting out there and doing it.  I have put in plenty of training.  From a race-walking point of view, I am probably fitter than I have ever been before.

The weather forecast doesn’t look promising though – seven days out and the forecast is for rain and temperatures of between 2 and 12 degrees.  But how accurate is a seven day forecast?

The only problem I have is a minor knot in my left glut (the left side of my bum for those of you who may not know where the glut is), and as a result I have been on the foam roller this week practising some amateur trigger-point therapy.

On the foam roller
Me on the foam roller after Thursday nights aborted walk

I noticed the problem on Thursday night not too far into a planned 10km walk in Richmond Park, and after 3km I decided to abort the walk and head home – something I wouldn’t have done in my younger years when I used to run through minor injuries and wonder why I spent so much time out of running with major injuries.

So I walked back home on Thursday night and got out the foam roller – something I don’t use often enough – and today (Saturday) I am feeling much better.  I have used the foam roller three times since Thursday and will continue using it for the next few days.

About a month ago I saw a tweet that linked to the video below demonstrating how to use a foam roller properly.  I have been following this method, which involves rolling form side to side as well as up and down, since and have found it to be much more effective than simply rolling my legs up and down over the roller like I used to.

How to use a foam roller video

If you use a foam roller, take a look at this video. It will be well worth it.

For the price (you can purchase a foam roller on Amazon for about £16), and the time required (about 15 to 20 minutes), I have found trigger point therapy using a foam roller to be much more effective than traditional sports massage, and I will continue to use the foam roller for another couple days leading up to the race.

I am planning on doing 10 miles tomorrow and then 5 miles on Tuesday and Thursday, but all at an easy pace.  And then on Friday we (my occasional training partner, Suzanne Beardsmore, is also racing) head to France for what will hopefully be a rewarding trip.

Last long walk before Château-Thierry

Training, , ,

In two weeks time I will be walking laps around a 2,400 meter road circuit at Château-Thierry in France for 24 hours.

So today was my last long training day before I start to taper towards the race.

It also happened to be parkrunday – the one day a week that I go for a run. As with last week I decided to walk approximately three hours to a parkrun that I hadn’t done before – Reigate Priory parkrun, and then run 5km before walking another 4 hours back home.

Last weekend I set the alarm for 4:30am on both Saturday and Sunday and both times the alarm woke my wife. Whilst she is extremely supportive of the ridiculous amount of time I spend walking (over 100 hours already this year), she wasn’t too happy about being woken up at 4:30am two days in a row. In fact she wasn’t too happy about being woken at 4:30am just once.

So this week I tried the ‘natural alarm’ – drink two large glasses of water before going to bed and the call of nature will wake me in about 6 hours. And it worked perfectly – I was awake at 4:25am. The only problem was that the ‘alarm’ also went off at midnight and again at 2am!

IMGN0594_thmAnyway, I had decided to run Reigate Priory parkrun which was about a 3 ½ hour (or slightly more) walk from home. So I decided to drive a few miles and parked the car in Thames Ditton, starting my walk at exactly 6am. My planned route was 14 miles meaning I should arrive at parkrun with about 10 minutes to spare before a 9am start, but I didn’t count on taking a ‘shortcut’ which went in the wrong direction and added almost 2 miles to my planned walk!

At 8am I realised that I was going to be late and I increased the pace by 45 to 60 seconds per mile. Good training, but when it came to running my hamstrings were tight and my 5km parkrun was a minute slower than last week.

I actually didn’t arrive at parkrun until 9:05am but fortunately they were running late and hadn’t started yet.

As soon as I had completed my run – in a slow (for me) 24:50 – I purchased a bottle of water from the local cafe and mixed in a sachet of Generation Ucan to give me some energy for the return trip, and then headed off towards Dorking. After walking 3 hours to get to parkrun, my plan was to walk west for an hour or so before heading back towards Thames Ditton via Leatherhead. This would give me a bit of variety rather than returning via the same route I had already walked, and would also enable me to avoid going back up the steep hill out of Reigate. As a race-walker I prefer to avoid hills if I can.

The walk back to Thames Ditton was a little longer than planned (22 miles) and took almost 4 ½ hours, but in total I completed a little over 40 miles for the day and am satisfied that my training has me in good condition for Château-Thierry.

 

Todays map
Todays route showing my ‘shortcut’ on the way down to Reigate

 

Garmin Art – RichardWalksLondon.com

Training, , , , ,

This blog is called RichardWalksLondon, yet most of my walks are outside of London City itself.  So today I decided to go for a walk around the streets of London.

Starting on the A4 next to Green Park, and finishing near the Southwark Bridge I used my Garmin to write the name of this blog across the streets of London.  This is referred to as “Garmin Art”.

Garmin Art - Richard Walks London (.com) map
Richard Walks London (.com) map

 

Garmin Art is not as easy as I thought it would be

I was limited by the layout of the streets which made it difficult to form the letters exactly as they should appear.  Letters containing diagonal lines such as the capital ‘R’ at the start and the ‘w’ and ‘k’ in ‘walks’ were especially difficult, and in order to do the ‘London’ I decided to drop down to the river after completing the ‘walks’ as I was unable to fit ‘London’ into the layout of the streets to the right of ‘walks’.

‘London’ was further complicated when I found that the street that was going to be the left side of the letter ‘n’ was closed to all traffic including pedestrians, and as a result the ‘n’ had to be moved to the right and became a lot smaller than planned.

I used MapMyRun to plan the route. It took several attempts to work out how to fit the letters and words into the street layout, and the planning time took longer than actually walking it.  In the end the walk was only 10 miles although I have also planned a much larger route (100 miles in total) which I might do during the summer.

The maps for todays walk can also be viewed on: