I posted my 5 week plan that I made for leading up to Wellington Round the Bays half marathon and the update on the second week on how things went. This is my third week training update leading to the next two weeks before Wellington Round the Bays half marathon!

Week 3 was another week of medium to high mileage week. With the The Tussock Traverse 26k trail run out of the way and a day of rest leading onto the week of running starting Monday 28th January. Target was to run a total of 80kms for the week.

Monday – 28th Jan – 12kms steady pace – it was pretty warm even at 6:30am when I did my run. Finished my run with a swim at oriental bay to cool off. The ‘unusual’ summer we are having is pretty good but sure does make it a bit uncomfortable because of the higher than normal temperatures in Wellington.

Tuesday – 29th Jan – 5k race @ 80% effort at about 4:10 pace and a 5k warm down jog post race. Managed to do the 5k race relatively easily with even splits. Jogged 5k so total of 10ks for the day. Again a fine warm day with high temperatures.

Wednesday – 30th Jan – 16k run at about 4:30 per Km pace. I did about 14kms at this pace and slowed down the last 2km to recover. Total 16kms done. This run was a bit of a test run to check how I can get into ‘race pace’ on the day of the race. Pushing 4:30 pace felt good and no major concerns. Did some core strength and foam rolling in the evening.

Thursday – 31st Jan – Rest day!. Lots of stretching and foam rolling to relax leg and ITB muscles.

Incidentally January 2013 was my highest mileage for the last 3 years of running. In January I ran a total of 308km (191miles) in total. This was a steady build up for over 5 months of slight increases in my weekly Kms. If you are planning to increase your running mileage make sure that you increase gradually and back off when things start hurting.

Monthly Increase in Kilometers.

One of my goals after this half marathon is to start training for my first Marathon. So this increase in Km is an important step to get my body adopted to the coming high mileage training. I’ll update on this in another post. 🙂

Friday – 1st of February – A steady 20km run. Now this was a special run! I ran with Greig and Willy, two local fitness experts/runners who are training for one of the toughest races on the planet. “Marathon Des Sables 2013” is a 6 day stage race across the sahara desert and these guys are doing it this year!

“The MdS is a multi-day ‘ultra-marathon’ or ‘ultra’ run in six days over a course of between 150 and 156 (254km) miles.”

Basically they set themselves a goal of running 5 marathons in 5 days in different parts of the country as part of training, their 5th marathon was scheduled in Wellington on Friday 1st Feb. They sent out a message to local runners to come join them for the run and I gladly joined them for 20kms.  They are fund raising for the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research. So please visit the Sahara Charity Challenge fund raising page and donate if you can.

It was great to run with them and they certainly were pushing a steady pace so all in all my 20km scheduled run was done with them out to Chocolate Fish cafe and back.

Willy and Greig just before heading off to complete the 5th marathon! Photo credit – Malaghan Institute.

Saturday – 2nd Feb – I had a 10k interval session scheduled for the morning. I ran this at the Lower Hutt Park Run – 5k + 5k, 2 sets of intervals.

Sunday – 3rd Feb – 12ks of easy running with a few hills! I headed up Mount Victoria and explored some of my favourite trails and did a couple of hill reps and a total of 14ks. Stopped on Oreintal bay and cooled off in the sea with a swim!

RTB Week 3 Recap

So here’s to the next two weeks of running leading up to Wellington Round The Bays and remaining injury free!