Journey to 100 miles - GSER PART TWO

By Rob Martin

It’s now exactly a month after my GSER Part One blog post, so this seems to be as good as any time to provide an update on my progress.

The good news is that I’ve remained un-injured, whilst gradually increasing my running volume & load.

The last week of June I managed 35kms with an 18km trail run on the Sunday, and last week I ran just over 45kms, with a 20km loop on the Sunday that had just over 900 meters of vertical gain.

This week will see another increase in distance, whilst also reintroducing some speed and hill work.

Importantly, as per my coaches’ orders, I’ve been including strength and accessory sessions that add core work, along with rolling and stretching to keep me feeling fresh.

An update on the race situation – I pulled the trigger on the Cairns To Port Douglas Ultra 120K which is 5 weeks away. https://www.cairnsportdouglastrailultra.com.au/

Jamie from Run Vault Performance has mapped out Base, Reset, Specificity and Taper weeks in Training Peaks that will get me to the start line ready to go, albeit definitely underdone, purely based on the lack of available training weeks from when I returned to running following the injury.

We discussed this situation and with this understanding I will treat the race as a stepping-stone from the 100K distance to the mile distance that I will need to cover at GSER.

I’ll be running with my mate John Kilkelly who lives in Cairns, who’s another Run Vault Performance athlete – we’ll stick together if it works, but if not, we’ll seek our own journeys to the finish line!

This week also sees me flying to Queenstown NZ for a quick break prior to The Guzzler weekend. All three of our Run Vault athletes are competing at the race, so we’ll be busy all day following and supporting them, along with all of our running club mates and Run Vault customers.

I won’t need to worry about any heat training this week – the temperatures in Queenstown have been lows of around -3 with tops of 0 degrees. Training will entail head to foot thermals, along with a beanie and gloves. I’m sure I can find somewhere to do some hill repeats which is what’s on the plan for Friday!

So that’s the current situation – everything is going to plan and I believe if I stick to that plan that I can achieve my goals for this year, being successful races at C2PDU and GSER.

That’s it for Part Two, but if you want anything more specific or have questions, please hit me up on
the Run Vault socials or at rob@runvault.com.au.

Happy running!
Rob

To finish off, here’s some photos from the C2PDU course that John took a couple of months ago.