Fraser Darcy

It’s two o’clock on a Saturday and the regular blog crowd shuffles in. There’s no one sittin’ next to me… and that’s where the comparisons to Piano Man end. I’ve made a good habit of sitting down on a Saturday afternoon to put together a recap of my week which makes it easy for me to compare it to this time last week. All up, I’d say it has been a pretty good week to kick off the taper towards Ballarat Marathon. The theme has been to keep everything sensible with my training and start to prioritise some relaxation.

On Monday that meant a nice easy 14km’s in Belair like I usually do. I got out a little bit later than normal though because I pieced together my recap of the National Athletics Championships for The Blue Line. Given we’ve been having warmer than usual April weather it was a bit warmer than I’d like but it was all good, only 14km’s of easy running so nothing to stress about. I did a bit of email admin, some gym, some jobs around the house and then got out for another good arvo run. Like most Monday’s I thought long and hard about whether to bother with strides after my arvo run. It’s so much easier to not bother but it feels alot better to have done them than skip them. So, I stopped being lazy and just did them. And felt better of course.

Perhaps the effects of the strides from the night before and keeping myself accountable led to a good Tuesday session. Or perhaps it was just because I hadn’t slaughtered myself on the Sunday with a 2.5hr long run for once. Whatever it was, it was pleasing to have a good 4*2km session with 2minutes of jogging between reps. I kept things pretty sensible and didn’t try to smack any reps any faster whilst I also held back from doing a 5th one. There was just no need and better to call it at a normal, sensible point, than regret doing one too many. Not too much else to report for the day after this, some email admin and an arvo run, but in the evening I put together a very mild curry for the first time in a while which was cool. Inspired by the vegetables and sauce packets that were still in the cupboard/fridge (potato, cauliflower, simmer sauce) I purchased a couple of extra ingredients (diced beef, naan bread) to make a curry for Alice and myself. Cooking a meal with multiple ingredients is always cool because it’s like, hey, here’s all these ingredients in this picture below, and then it all gets turned into a big warm bowl of something ready to eat. And it was good but you’ll have to take my word for it.

Wednesday. My usual run day with Jess and Jacob however both were off doing different things so I flew solo which was good. I still ran the same sort of loop I normally do on Wednesday’s and just kept it to 90 minutes. At one point though, a good song came on so I decided to turn the screws a little bit for a mini progression down to 3:45/km. It felt pretty good so I finished it off running prety steadily. If I was really pushing things I would’ve tried to get the average under 4:00/km but instead, chose the sensible option and did not do that. For the rest of the day I did some gym, cleaned the house in readiness for Emma and Dylan to come over for dinner and DID NOT go for an arvo run. The taper was kicking in with the first omission of an afternoon run at this point. I celebrated by cooking dinner for Emma, Dylan and Alice (beef chevapchichi’s and chicken skewers + waffle fries). Again, no picture makes it hard for you to believe this happened but I swear that all three of them dropped dead because of how good the choice of waffle (or ‘lattice’) fries was as a side dish. $3 from the freezer section. They’re a Canadian thing, I used to eat them at Perisher, they have a higher surface area to potato volume ratio so are more crunchy if you turn them in the oven at the recommended time intervals.

Thursday. A week ago this was my big special block day. This week it was back to just a normal easy run in the morning, easy run in the afternoon and with some TBL writing in the middle of it, plus getting started on some programs. So a pretty quiet day which is good for me at this point of the taper. Everything is feeling easy in the running, like I’m hardly breathing both during and after runs, and I’m recovering well enough to want to run further in my doubles.

I used some of that want to run further to change my original ambitions with my Friday session. Originally, I was planning on running 10km’s at around 3:05-3:10/km pace within the RAO group session. This would be a bit faster than marathon pace but would give me the confidence that 3:15-3:16 per km pace would be comfortable. Alternatively, my other idea was to run 15km’s at 3:15-ish to really lock into marathon pace. Having wanted to run further on my double the day before I knew I would prefer to run further in my session again so limited myself to going out at marathon pace. If I wanted to only run 10km’s then I could just stop. If I wanted to run further though, by going out at marathon pace I had the option without introducing too much risk (which would’ve happened if I’d started out at 3:05-3:10 pace). So that’s what I did with Fin and Izzi for company I rolled around the 1.4km loop going at around 3:15/km average. They stepped off at 30 minutes while I kept going for another 18 minutes to make it 15km’s in total at 3:14/km. If I could start my race on Sunday with that type of pace and effort then that would be good. I was sweating a fair bit by the end of it but it was also around the mid-20’s at this point so with a bit of luck, it might be ten degrees cooler and I can roll through even more comfortably.

The rest of Friday was pretty good… it was Good Friday after all! I’d had a few ideas of what to do over the Easter break, go away somewhere, go for a drive down south etc. but really, with the not so great weather and the fact that I was going away the following weekend, I was pretty keen on just staying home. I hadn’t actually spent an Easter weekend in Blackwood since 2020 and before then it would’ve probably been never, having gone away for Easter ‘religiously’. Most years it would be to Echuca for a tennis tournament, then when I became a rock climbing and bushwalking instructor it was for rock climbing or bushwalking trips, and then when I lived in Quorn it always felt like I was away for Easter. So to spend an Easter at Blackwood is kind of a special treat in itself. I still went out for a bit of climb at Onkaparinga though in the afternoon and had a light hit of tennis to evoke some old Easter memories so it wasn’t all just sit on the couch and relax type vibes. There was also of course the very non-relaxing activity of watching Essendon win too.

Maybe because of Essendon’s stressful win capping off Good Friday I needed a proper relaxing Saturday involving an easy run in Belair, some newspaper reading, some time spent following Alice around to a few furniture shops and then some more couch sitting and of course, sitting here at 2:40pm writing this blog!

Tuning in back on Sunday morning, all that really happened for the rest of Saturday was an afternoon run that felt pretty good and a dinner at a mates place. Not that exciting compared to Sunday morning obviously. The final ‘long’ run and end to the penultimate week of training before Ballarat. There was no official long run with RunAsOne this weekend and I believe this is the first Sunday run in a long, long time that I haven’t either run at an ‘official’ long run with RAO or run a race. It was nice therefore to have a Sunday to myself for a change and get to run at whatever pace I felt like. Often when running with a group you are dictated to run at the pace that suits the majority of the runners. When running by yourself, you are in control and can run at the pace that 100% suits you. Which is what I did this Sunday whilst listening to Led Zeppelin for the first 45 minutes and then The Doors for the second 45 minutes. Again, I was revoking some old Easter and Sunday memories here because my original Sunday long run when I lived out in Quorn was usually to Led Zeppelin for the first part and then I also spent a couple of Easter’s in Quorn running long on a Sunday. So two birds with one stone were harmed in the making of this Sunday long run.

All up it was a great morning of running, I finished at my car with a big smile happy with having such a good run. I got rolling to 4:00/km without really trying and then proceeded to run 3:45/km at times without looking at my watch. I thought about slowing down a bit but decided against it. I wasn’t pushing to keep this 3:45/km effort, it’s probably just an effect of having music in, being on my own, and the taper already kicking in… I must be getting fitter to be able to easily hold this pace. Plus, part of the science of the taper is to reduce the easy volume, but keep the intensity the same. I’ve been doing that this week by cutting out a couple of afternoon easy runs, cutting out some of the hillier sections in Belair and keeping everything else the same. This has also been in an effort to ‘funnel’ down into marathon pace as the taper continues so that the running that I produce on marathon day feels natural. The evidence that I’ve been doing this correctly is the fact that this Sunday long run felt normal, except I was 10-15s/km faster on average, and also that across the whole week of 160km’s I had an average pace of 4:07/km which is 10-20s/km faster than normal.

From here, less than 7 runs away from the Ballarat Marathon the game plan is to continue funnelling down into marathon pace. One easy run a day, a shorter-hard Tuesday session, some program writing and of course plenty of relaxation. With the more spare time up my sleeve due to less running it is easy to get caught up stressing about minor details in this last week whilst also building up this race as the be-all-and-end-all. I have learnt that is not that helpful in the past and instead will be adopting the approach that worked for a few races earlier this year and just focusing on one day at a time in the build up, whilst also acknowledging that each race and marathon is just an opportunity to test my fitness, have fun and prepare myself even better for the next one. I doubt I will pump out a blog on the Sunday or even Monday following Ballarat so I guess I’ll report back with how I went at some stage next week after the race. Until then, thanks for reading and thanks for the support.