Tonight was full of good lucks, as I went to the club for the last time before Sunday. I ran with a couple of fairly new members, also doing London. We did the madam Tussuad route, but cut it short. Just over 4 miles I think. Maurice nearly hugged me good luck and said it would be “a piece of cake”
Thanks to all the generous donations since January I have hit my £1,000 target.!!! THANKS
I don’t like this, but it’s what you are supposed to do apparently.
Weekend plans were turned on their head a bit, and I struggled to keep focused, but in the end all was OK. Ray kindly drove me to Richmond Park so I could enjoy my last long run in the sun. There were hundreds of people out basking in the 18 degrees which had hit London town. So many runners, all parading in their marathon outfit – charity vests galore. The sun was hard – I’m half praying that it won’t be like this a week today, yes, a week today. I had to drink far more than I am used to, and everything felt a little bit harder… I may have to dig out the running cap! I ran 9.5 miles.
I didn’t fancy running at all tonight, but I forced myself and ‘jogged’ around Clapham Common. It was boring, but put me in a better mood, strangely! Also, no Garmin! I ran for 25mins.
To allow for an important evening work do I decided to run at lunchtime. I really enjoyed it. My day was nicely broken up and I felt revived for the afternoon. A little frustrating trying to navigate around the tourists around soho and wait what seemed like hours for very slow traffic lights at Hyde Park Corner. Nonetheless, the run was painless and fairly pleasant. A speedy shower back at 117 and then on the tube back to work. I’d like to try this again…
Tapering is very strange. A bizarre mix of emotions. It feels wrong to be running so little when you feel so fit, but at the same time I could quite easily not run at all. I’m all runned out, nearly every aspect is becoming tiresome. Carrying around my kit, washing my kit, eating at certain times, eating certain things, saying no to social gatherings. Although I’m already panicking slightly with what I can replace my marathon training with… trail running, cross country, biking? I forgot my garmin tonight – major fail, I now feel like I cannot run without it, naked, almost. So I detoured via home on the way to club, but sadly didn’t continue on my way when I realised the sun was shining, Regent’s Park was just a hop and skip away and I would be finished by 7.30. I ran randomly through the park, finding it hard to cover 5 miles. Strangely it seems so much harder to cover a mid distance 5 miles than it is to cover 10+. It’s as if my mind and body thinks “If you’re not going to commit to a decent distance than we can’t be bothered” I survived and had a super early night, asleep by 10.45.
Back to the hills this weekend. The weather was amazing. I spent Saturday walking up and down mountains shooting photographs of Ray and his brother on their bikes – to help out for his bike event this summer. Hopefully they will make their way into a magazine… On the Sunday we drove through the Brecon Beacon park towards Port Talbot, and a mountain bike area called Afan. (The drive over the mountains was beautiful – sweeping views of the valley, red kites and lambs.) Here Ray went off on his bike and I ran a slow but steady 13 miles. I was scheduled to do 15, but naughtily with my taper in mind, I decided that the extra 2 weren’t really going to do anything amazing for me. A long drive home, and an early night. Only two weeks to go…..
A nice early track session. Me and Mills got out there before the rest of the club, bumping into the ‘fast guys’ as they began their session too. We warmed up together, then they set off on their mad 20x200m sprints and we did our fairly comfortable 8x800m with 200m walk recovery. It felt really good, at at times perhaps a little too comfortable so we upped up the tempo a bit on the last couple of reps. Chatting to one of the guys he explained Yasso 800 sessions, which we were accidentally practicing. You run 800m reps at your target marathon time. So for us, we were aiming for completing the 800m in 3:45mins. Apparently you should use this throughout your training, building up to 10 reps, which should, apparently help you achieve your goal time. Something for next time perhaps… |
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