Ultrarunning, time management, kids, sleep,

over exposed panorama of Stourport

In my struggle for time for training I find it humorous all these articles you see in "Joggers" World and other mainstream magazines suggesting ways to improve and get more sleep. Naps? Must be nice to not be tied to kids who don't nap! Put your phone down, did that a long time ago. Stop watching tv, haven't watched for years. What I'm saying is their suggestions are shit - I've been doing these for years!

My window of free time outside of my "job" as a stay at home dad is 8-9 hours.

Most of my days I'm tied to 1 or 2 kids from around 530-6am until 730-8 pm. Fortunately for three of those days I can run during the day. Two I am able (for now) to run pushing my son in a running stroller most times 13 miles (varying from 9.5 to 16 miles). This has been a blessing and I greatly enjoy it. The third day I am working and can sneak in a combined 8 miles running to work from my car, on my lunch break, and back to my car. I could stretch this to 10 miles most likely. That's a solid few days if all goes well that week.

Of the other four days I've got a martial arts class one night which takes up my window to run, probably good as it's a forced day "off". However, it's late and eats into my sleep time, leaving me with a guaranteed 6-7 hours. 

That leaves three nights to run. Those nights if I can muster the "go" (at least lately!) I'll be home and can be in bed by 930pm. 

I have time to train obviously. But in looking at my recent sleep I definitely am lacking. 930pm to 530am is 8 hours which one would expect to be sufficient. Over the past month however add in the random kid awake in the middle of the night, leaching 1-2 hours, and a 50 mile race increasing the importance of sleep for recovery which isn't available and my mind/body is thrashed. 

This is more mentally noticeable than physically. Motivation is lacking. This seems to be the most obvious. So does this circumstance fall into the realm of over training? I really haven't been over training by running too much? More like under recovered. But that implies over trained? 

So what the hell!? With two weeks of big training until I need to taper for a 100 miler I'm lost. Should I roll the injury dice, HTFU, and run these two weeks? Then taper like crazy and hope rest is "allowed" and I can run confidently. 

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So I wrote the above early morning. Mid morning I got out for a run and felt miserable mentally. My legs felt ok though. I've accepted the fact I still need rest even after only running three times in the past 10 days. I do not know if I'll run SDW 100 in five weeks. I can shift to the fall and do Cotswold 100 or even Snowdonia 50 again. So racing isn't over. For now I need to take a break, I can't get any money back for my SDW entry so I'll just see how I'm feeling as the time goes and if I bounce back I'll run. 

And rest.........