Countdown begins....

Only 29 miles done this week, as I was a little sore / lazy after Bungay. But finished it off with a fairly quick half marathon(ish) on local and quite hilly trails with Holly Weimaraner. She probably ran at least a full marathon and included several sprint sessions while assisting some of the local wildlife with their fitness regimes – she is very good with other dogs and ignored some wild geese in an open field, but she does find deer difficult to resist. I left her sister Sophie at home, as she gets bored after about 10k and starts dawdling behind me while giving me a look that says ‘why... ???’  I really need to get a lot more miles in over the next 3 weeks, so Holly will get much fitter and then Sophie can then enjoy the period where I am supposed to be tapering nearer the event.

 

No sign of the baby yet, but nappies will be competing with the training plan very soon....

Bungay Marathon

Stupidly ignoring a splinter in my foot had caused some training problems but Ayten diagnosed and cured me just in time for the Bungay Marathon, which was fantastic news.

 

Ayten is now heavily pregnant so hanging around in a remote part of East Anglia for hours on end wasn’t very sensible – so I lined up with the very small field (maybe 300 ?) on a windy and very chilly Sunday morning. We had hail, bright sunshine, more hail, more bright sunshine....  It was a two lap course and the first half of the lap was surprisingly hilly. I went out too fast but it felt OK and I managed to keep it up much better than expected – finished in a fairly relaxed 3.42. I’m sure I could have got under 3.40 to legitimise my easier qualifying marathon, and at a pinch I think I had a chance of killing myself to set a new PB (sub 3.38) – but the aim was to use this for training, and pushing the pace that hard in the last 10k would have made recovery much more difficult and compromised the continuing training. So, it looks like I am still on track – and I’ll make sure I spot splinters much more quickly in future !