It's been a bad week on the training front. Work has been quite stressful, as I've been here there and everywhere because of other dispensers being on holiday. It hasn't taken any more time than a normal working week but it has been much more stressful trying to sort out issues for clients where you only get half a story. I have another week doing this (only spending 1 day next week in my own branch, the rest I am elsewhere) and this is an issue in itself because my own clients are not getting seen as early as normal! I'm fed up!
Yesterday I didn't want to run. I felt run down and felt like I needed a sofa day to let my mind rest. As it was, I decided that I should at least try to do a run and maybe once out I would be fine. So, I got my Camelbak ready and enough sustenance to last for a 3 hours and 15 minute run.
In the first mile I was congratulating myself for getting out, sure that I would be OK, and after 2 miles I was into a hilly first loop (the intention today to do 3 loops). At 3 miles I wasn't feeling it, and had cramp (in my feet of all places). I started to walk when I should have been running and pondered the possibility of walking 18 miles instead of running them. Would I prefer to walk 18 miles or go home now? I'd walk 18 miles, I thought. By 4 miles my ankle was aching (I had twisted this slightly on my hilly cross country run on Wednesday which hurt at the time but I only remembered I'd done it when walking felt a bit niggly on Thursday). I gave up and rang Graeme and asked for a lift back home. It was pouring with rain and I had just lost the will to live!
I got back home and had a hot bath and a full English breakfast (which I had fancied for over a week) and we watched Terminator 3 and vegged out for the afternoon. The evening was taken up with a family BBQ (which ended up being a cook-indoors-party as the weather was so shite) and I completely went off the rails and drank a bottle of red wine and ate so much that I could barely move by 8 o'clock!
I had also emailed William and Shaun earlier on in the day to ask about my future mileage for Bangalore. I believe I will be able to get higher than marathon distance by running 15 minutes longer each week and I wanted to know should I keep going up and up? Do I have any cutback weeks? Can I run and strength train right up to Amsterdam because my finishing time there was not in the slightest bit important? Can I run longer than marathon distance after Amsterdam up until 2 weeks before Bangalore? I just want to get into my head what my plan is so I can prepare myself, I suppose. Anyway, William got back in touch quite quickly to say that if I need a cutback then I should have one and always to judge how I'm feeling and train accordingly... as to the rest of the questions he would talk to Shaun and let me know what he thought. So, in the past few weeks on a Saturday I have ran 8.6 miles through the forest, 14 miles along the Coast to Coast route, 14 miles from work to home and last week I ran 16.8 miles. As all of the runs (bar the last one) were all tough because of hills and the 16.8 was my longest run since November last year, maybe I was due for an easier week anyway. So, I can't be too gutted really.
Next week is a half marathon which I believe to be quite tough as there are a couple of hills and it is a lot of trail running. I'm looking forward to this but again I am not concerned at the time it takes me to complete it. The following week I have decided to have my first go at "out and back" looped miles... which is what Bangalore will be like. I am going to run along Coast road (there are 2 hills and 2 long inclines, so it's a good one for training) for 3 hours and 15 minutes, which I anticipate will be around 18 miles. I wonder how it will feel at the end of each 6 mile loop to run past my house and go again....
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