Another holiday in France, this time with added 36 degree weather! In the UK, we were protected mostly from the fierce weather happening on the continent. This meant we set of for France with temperatures of around 17 degrees, to driving past Paris in 36 degrees. Luckily for me, I was in a car with air conditioning, so barely noticed until we got out for lunch along the route. Scorchio! Poor old Jim, Lolly and Dave weren’t so lucky, having…
So, when I was up in Scotland running that crazy crazy race, Rowan kept dropping a few hints about how he was going to Spain at the end of November for some winter climbing in the sun with his friend Simon. “Ha, that sound lovely” I thought to myself. Once I’d got back from the race, Anya started hassling me. Well, it turns out she really fancied going to Spain too, and if she was going, she really needed a…
After an abortive attempt for Ed and I to on a ‘psyched’, two men on a bouldering mission to Font on the day France went into their first COVID19 lockdown (We went to Carrefour, cooked dinner, went to bed and the next day drove home 🙁 ) it’s our first Fontainebleau climbing holiday for a LOOONG time. This time, we went large, with 11 of us in a massive Gite up at the posh little village of Bois de Roi….
What an odd year for running and climbing. Reflecting back on it, I feel like it’s been a bit of a crap year for my running. Running Reflections Except, it really hasn’t: One of my targets at the start of the year post was like the past 2 years, to run the year again in km. Yep, did it: 2023km in 2019. Then, in mid June, I destroyed my 5k time while testing the new Loxley Lash 5k course with…
Aaah! Holiday time! Yeah, I’m well overdue a blog update, but I’m still not in a blogging mood. It would be a shame however not to capture some notes of how the climbing went while in sunny République française. Day 1: Beauvais Nainville We’ve never made it to Beauvais before, despite it being on Liz’s hit list for a while. It’s a littler further north than we usually head to based on where we’ve been staying, but being in the…
Just a quick post to list together the blog posts I made about my recent Embrace running holiday: Day one – Arriving and Mile Reps on the wooden boardwalk at Portimao Day two – The endurance session around the Woodland trails at Mata Nacional do Barão de São João Day three – Track day at the Lagos athletics track. Day four – Hill Reps at Praia da Boca do Rio and on The Punisher
The last day of running in what has been a fairly full on little holiday. Starting from Saturday when we arrived I’ve done around 75k and it’s not finished yet! Today is the Lagos Town targeted run. It’s a 5mile/8k figure of 8 loop, with an aid station in the middle of it. This means you can do any number of full or partial laps and be supported for whatever you’re aiming for. The coaches work with you to take…
All the hard week over the week has been done. We’ve done endurance in the woods, speed on the track and strength on the hills. Today was purely about a beautiful, coastal run along bright red clay trail between two little seaside beach villages, Luz and Burgau. This run is super high on my list of all time favourites. The trail is technical enough to be interesting, but not a pain in the arse, long enough to be a decent…
Today was Hell On The Hills which is everything as tough as it sounds! Seven hill reps in the sun and then a steady climb up the Punisher, a 20% hill out near Praia da Boca do Rio a tiny little gorgeous looking beach roughly halfway between Lagos and Sagres. We were lucky to have the sun back this morning, with temperature around the 20 mark, but a strong wind was coming up off the coast, making the sea look…
Yay! It’s track day. I do love a good speedy track session. Today’s plan after an additional 30mins lie in, was to head to the Lagos running track and after a 1 mile warm up, do 4 sets of 800m/400m/200m intervals, each with 70secs recovery between and a slow 200m walk between sets. Ugh 800ms! Checking out my track stats from my last Embrace trip, we’d done 12x400m with the 400m intervals at about 3:45mins/km, so I had a rough…