Week Eight

Tuesday - 9.5 miles
Wednesday - 7 miles
Saturday - 2.5 hours (15 miles)
Sunday - 2 hours (13 miles)

On Monday, I bumped into my friend Sally whilst at the hospital.  She's a student physio and has been doing her placement at the same hospital as me.  Last year she helped me out a lot with the Paris marathon (I don't think I could've completed it without her) and we'd been chatting about whether she could come and give me a sports massage between my two marathons on race day.   When I saw her, she told me that she'd rearranged her calendar in order to be free that day - how great is that? - it'll be so lovely to have a friendly face at the midway point to sort out my aching muscles.  We are also going to do a 'practice run' in a few weeks' time to make sure everything goes smoothly on the day.

Monday afternoon I had my pre-kidney donation psych assessment, you can read more about that here and here.

Tuesday I had a pretty terrible day at work, so I headed out for a run as soon as I got home.  I wanted to go to Midnight Runners but due to the size of the group and the exercise stops, it takes 3 hours (door-to-door) to run a 10k.  Lately I've been finding that I just can't spare the extra 2 hours so I've been running Tuesday evenings on my own.  I ran the Midnight Runners route but with St James's Park and Millbank added on to make up some extra distance.  I was in such a bad mood I didn't take any photos, but this one again sums up the kind of run it was:

On Wednesday evening I did the same route again, only this time I stopped to take a picture of the fabulous view from Tower Hill (the lower route is closed at the moment due to resurfacing works; on the higher route you get the amazing sight of the Tower of London with the Shard in the background). 

 On Thursday my fabulous new trainers arrived.  They are both beautiful and very well padded.  I wore them round the house all evening!

We had friends visiting us this weekend, so I knew I had to get up early to run on Saturday.   Because I was wearing my beautiful new trainers, I wanted to avoid the mud so I planned a route which partially replicated the Horsham Joggers route last weekend. 

As usual, Sussex was very pretty.  As always happens when I get a new pair of trainers, I was extra vigilant to any sign of them being less than perfect, and as always I started inventing loads of problems.  My feet feel numb! They're too tight!  They're not like my other trainers!  (which is ridiculous as they're incredibly similar) - I'll get used to them I'm sure.  This is exactly why it's so important to break them in a couple of months before the actual race.

Nevertheless I got round, it didn't rain and there were plenty of signs that spring is on the way.  

Saturday evening, I drank a lot of prosecco and amaretto and stayed up til 3am with our friends.  This is not conducive to early morning runs (no! you don't say!!) and I eventually surfaced about 11am feeling rough.  Coffee, paracetamol and a brisk dog walk helped a bit and by the time I got back to London at 3pm I had convinced myself I had to run for at least an hour.    Within the first couple of miles, I felt completely normal and managed the whole 2 hours after all.  I was quite surprised how comfortably I can do a half marathon these days, this used to be A Really Big Deal and now it feels almost like a short run.  So weird.

The best bit about it was that the Mall was closed for some reason.  I love running down the middle of the Mall because it's the finish line of the London marathon so it always feels quite evocative.  I stopped and took this photo as I doubt I will be taking photos on the actual day... When I finally see this view I expect it'll be quite emotional!

Tonight I added up the total I've done so far this year in my training and it came to 332 miles (534 km), which is 41.5 miles (67 km) per week!  I'm now at the halfway point of my training plan, only eight more weeks to go until the ultra, though I have a couple of marathons to get through first...

Donations, as ever, are extremely welcome: http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/marathonmadness