During the first 10 laps today, I was certain this blog would be positive and along the lines of “not as bad as expected”. I planned on describing my efforts like the difficult conversation with partner/family member which turns out to be OK after all.

Unfortunately life doesn’t work that way.

My favorite part of running is when it is subconscious. I could let my mind wander and was taking on food and drink as planned, while maintaining a good but not suicidal pace without focusing on doing so.

After this my run turned into a sort of inner struggle which would more resemble an argument from those Rihanna music videos verging on domestic violence. Although I’d be very surprised if Mumsnet complain about me glorifying anything!

My master plan to take more food and drink backfired. After lap 12 I started feeling full and my heart rate went to around 85-90% of my max, refusing to...

There’s always a point you reach when training towards an event where you feel your last efforts on race day are a distant memory and the next one is too far away to focus on.

Since my last race was in October, that point is close to becoming a distant memory too. Some of my favourite running preparation quotes focus on the 12 weeks before, luckily for me I have “geared” my training so it’ll be more interesting (challenging) the closer I get to race day.

I’m unsure of who to attribute this to, but I’ve always put a lot of stock in the expression “If you can’t run it in a week, you won’t be able to run it in a day” Given that as a yardstick to measure my training against I’d be pretty happy at this point. I’ve ran equal or above the race distance (44 miles) for 17 of the 20 weeks this year.

Unfortunately this means very little if I can’t gradually increase my longest training run...