I then immediately went back into full training mode at 70 – 80 km per week. Then a cold set me back for a week and I missed several days of training. My pace had been really sluggish, but I thought I was starting to see the impact of the interval sessions. I got in 3 solid weeks of training in January, and my Strava fitness score was steadily increasing. Now that I’m following UK lockdown rules and not currently training with them, I miss all the incidental language learning I got from the training, in addition to missing the training itself. Given the history between Scotland and Sweden I really should be better – we’re historically predisposed towards running fast away from Vikings. It’s been humbling but also a great experience to be known only for being the Scottish woman who won’t understand most of what you are saying and whose pronunciation of anything is largely incomprehensible. I come from a club where I won the Women’s Open Trophy in 2018. I generally run with the 5:30/km pace group on a Thursday night for the 90-minute session: They have groups from sub 4:00/km to 6:00/km. That’s because the fastest runners do their intervals on the Tuesday evening and cunning timing is an easy way to improve my relative performance. I am usually going with the faster intervals group on a Monday. I think it would be fair to say I am slightly below average compared to the regular attendees. It’s a big club and divides into different pace groups for training. I was also being much more flexible, moving sessions around and doing different types of sessions in order to be able to train with my new running club, Solvikingarna (this translates as The Sun Vikings), on Monday and Thursday evenings. I jumped into the same plan I had followed for both Loch Ness and Chicago, but with fewer weeks to prepare. Starting on 6 th January it was time to get with the program. The sheer busyness of moving though seemed to take its toll, and my Strava fitness score stubbornly kept dropping despite maintaining a base mileage of around 30 miles per week. I thought that maybe since I hadn’t executed it as well, my recovery would be correspondingly much swifter than from Loch Ness. I had felt pretty strong at the Auchterarder Half Marathon just three weeks after Chicago. I debated perhaps running to Sweden to kill two birds with one stone, but it seemed impractical given the amount of furniture I’d need to be carrying.
Unlike after Loch Ness, I couldn’t afford to take months to recover: training for London was supposed to begin in early January, and that was just a month after the overseas move. That marathon didn’t go quite as well as I’d hoped. There are though a few photos of beautiful Swedish scenery if you like that sort of thing.Īs regular readers will be aware, I emigrated to Sweden six weeks after participating in the Chicago marathon. There’s no grand story arc – like with a race report, or a training journey that actually culminates in reaching the start line of a race. I have a cold and haven’t slept well in a week.
Instead, I am writing this whilst feeling a little sorry for myself. This morning I should have been on a flight to London.
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