3 weeks left, 39 miles and unexpectedly urgent need for perseverance during a taper week

I had a largely positive outlook at the start of this week, my training plan only called for a total of 35 miles throughout the week with a long run of 18 miles. My first two training runs on Tuesday and Wednesday evenings should have been 5 and 7, but ended up only being 5.4 and 4 miles. My legs felt like they were stuck in cement for both of these. This should have been a sign of things to come!

I managed to do another of the 5.4 mile loops on Friday evening which was slightly more tolerable. I had an unorthodox way to overtake someone a few weeks back at the bottom of a hill, to avoid running onto the road and towards traffic, I had ran onto a slant where a grass verge led up to a car park which was above the pavement to the left and had ran along a brick wall for about 30 metres that was about 5 foot high.

Being a bit of a man-child, I used this as something to look forward to for the first 3 miles of this route and enjoyed having the extra difficulty of balancing and not veering left. It must have looked rather strange to any drivers going past, seeing a 6'4" man doing this for no logical reason!

My 18 miles yesterday was quite challenging, I could maintain a steady pace for most of the distance but found it difficult to regulate my breathing. It wasn’t warm by any stretch of the imagination, although when it was sunny I found I couldn’t keep up the same pace. I think because the weekly total was only around half of the week before, my motivation wasn’t quite at the same level .

I finished the week with a 6.4 mile run this morning with my friend Paddy. This was considerably better than any of my other training this week. We managed to force a comparatively fast pace as opposed to our usual efforts and I didn’t have any of the difficulties encountered earlier in the week.

I had devoured the Adhanarand Finn audiobook of “The Way of the Runner” over about 3 days earlier in the week. This tells about his visit to Japan to train with professional runners there. It was gripping and there was a quote in it that was a very good example of inversion.

Even though I really struggled for parts of my training this week, I did find this was true for after I’d finished each outing. Hopefully this will be a positive sign for the race in just under 2 weeks.