Upping My Running Game

For those of you that don’t know, I’m Sean Radford, the founder of TrainAsONE. And many many years ago I used to be an okay runner, often competing in mountain marathons and long orienteering events. However, following various breaks from running due to personal circumstances, my running over the past few years has been a little aimless. I have been running regularly, and even doing some road races (something I didn’t do in my younger days), and I have trained for these events, but not with a full heart or focus – causing TrainAsONE to tell me off for missing speed sessions! I have decided that this year (2023) things should be different.

So this year I am going to run most (if not all) of the 14 Sportlink Grand Prix 2023 races, with an aim to get as high up the leaderboard for my category as possible.

To get the ball rolling, I have already entered the first 5 events, which provides a busy racing schedule up to April. As entry to the subsequent races open up, I’ll enter them too (family commitments permitting).

As seen in the table above (showing my upcoming races entered within TrainAsONE), I also have the Spring Blickling Half Marathon in March. I entered this last year and it is not part of the Sportlink Grand Prix series, hence I’ve categorised as a secondary race (it’s tempting to put as casual, but I doubt I will run it as such!).

I know I’m not a slow runner, but I’m certainly not a very fast one either, so it will be very interesting to see how I do. Time permitting my next task is to hunt down previous race results to see how the competition generally stacks up to set my expectations and target race times. Then I would like to use the in-development version of TrainAsONE to train me specifically to achieve these targets. I like to think of this as my secret weapon, as (unless you know otherwise) there is nothing else available that can do this.

Right, I need to go for a run! Unfortunately, I am looking after my children today, so I have had to change today’s workout constraints. My nice 6 minute assessment run is now a short easy workout around the driveway. Not a great start to the training – but a necessary one.

Till next time – happy training.

N.B. If you have easy access to previous Sportlink Grand Prix race results, and can share, that would be most appreciated.