With the sickness bug from last week banished, the week started strongly with a really good bit of refereeing. However, annual leave and family visiting over the second half of the week meant this was more of a ‘holding pattern’ week.

Weight change: * NOT RECORDED *
Training: Refereeing 10k, Recovery 5k, parkrun 5k, Refereeing 10k
Total Training Distance: 29.3 km

Weight loss

Due to this being a bit of a holding week, I didn’t record my weight on the Monday. I know, two ‘dead’ weeks in a row! This wasn’t helped by my Withings scales falling off my wireless network at home (I upgraded the set-up here due to the woeful wireless performance of the plus.net router). That’s all resolved now though.

So, although no progress on continued weight loss, some cursory checks during the week show that I haven’t put it back on again either!

Training

I had two games this week. When refereeing, I will typically knock out around 10k in distance. This will be a combination of running speeds, including quite a lot of direction changes and stop/start.

This means recovery takes longer than your average bit of running about, and I am still working on getting that balance right. I’ve certainly felt signs of over-training in previous weeks due to this, so having the family over and a bit of a break was welcome.

The positive takeaway I am having in the games is that in terms of fitness, the games are not testing me. My heart rate is always lower than in any of my training sessions. Of course, this is nothing to be complacent over, and I will keep up the training throughout the season — I just need to consider the recovery aspects more.

As a result of all of the above, there was no dedicated speed training session during the week. This was deliberate. With two games featuring, it was going to be a big ask to shoehorn that in and for it to be worthwhile (i.e. no point during a speed training session if absolutely broken!)

However, I did record my fastest time at my local parkrun this year (21:45). It’s not the flattest parkrun in the world, so I was happy with that!

What’s next?

‘Just the one’ game this week, so my intention for this week is for it to be a strong training week. This should entail:

• Tempo run (including hills in it)
• The game itself
• Speed training
• parkrun (with the running buggy)
• Appropriate recovery!

Oh, and I should actually weight myself at the end of it this time…