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…
After a 5kish recovery run last night down the hill to the Lagos Marina (and back up the hill again through the old town!), we stuffed our faces with beef bourguignon, mash, beer and red wine and then headed to bed earlyish (10pm OMG!) so we could be up and ready for today. Monday was the Woodland Trail Endurance run. This is probably my favourite run of the weekend; 1-4 laps of a 5ish mile woodland trail under the soothing…
This year I managed to sign up for the full Spring Trail Series hosted by Dark and White Events. This is three 15k-ish up and down the hills in the Peak District during the spring. I’ve run a couple of their events before, and was really looking forward do this. Last year, I ran the last event in the series at Low Bradfield and came well into the “Gold” pace bracket, setting me up for what I hoped would be…
I’m out in Portugal on another Embrace Sports running holiday. I’ve been out here twice before, but never managed to really write about it beyond the odd mention in summary posts. Let’s see if I can do the holiday a bit of justice. Liz and I flew out yesterday (Saturday) after a pretty over crowded train journey to Manchester airport. Why can’t Virgin trains get their act together so getting to the airport with luggage isn’t a complete nightmare? The…