Week Thirteen

Wednesday - 9 miles

Thursday - 7 miles

Sunday - 4 hours (23.5 miles)

It's been lovely having lighter evenings this week but even so, I've found it difficult to fit in running around placement because I'm just so incredibly busy.  On Wednesday I did an 11-7 shift so I was able to run in the morning, which was great.  I just ran from home to Southwark Park, did a couple of loops and came home.  The spring flowers are all out so it looks very pretty:

On Thursday night I needed to run after work.  I didn't get home until late so I set off at 7pm and did a quick loop of Vauxhall/Millbank.  I'd turned off auto-pause on my Garmin so I didn't want to stop for photos (!) otherwise I would've taken more... but this will have to suffice:

Saturday was a planned rest day - the first weekend where I haven't run/done some form of activity both days since December.  What a luxury!

Sunday I had 4 hours planned and Horsham Joggers were doing 15 miles, so I figured I could just run to the start and back and that would make up the time.  Wrong!  We ran a quick pace today so the 15 miles was done and dusted in 2 hours 25 minutes.  It was a very sunny day and I got a stitch within the first few miles which plagued me all the way through.  I rarely get stitches and I can work through them (they're psychological, I swear!) by walking/paying attention to my breathing/sips of water.  That's what I did, but unfortunately it made it a bit less fun, especially as I have no idea why it happened and would hate to have a similar experience on race day.

Once the Horsham Joggers finished, I still had over an hour to make up.  I ran a chunk along the river, which has dried up a lot since I last ran along here.  This is the path where my beautiful black trainers were destroyed by mud - completely mud-free today!

The last hour was a pretty painful affair.  I only managed 8 kilometres, I walked sections of it, my stitch was hurting me and so were my knees.  I would've stopped sooner but even taking all the shortcuts I could think of, there was no quicker way to get home.    I'm already planning to skip one of my weekday runs this week as I have Brighton marathon next Sunday and feel I need at least something of a taper, particularly given placement is likely to be somewhat testing again this week!  If you are interested you can get updates on how I'm doing on the day using the Brighton marathon app.  My target time is 4.5 hours (which would normally be a very slow time for me) but given how slow I've been lately I don't know if I'll even manage that!

If you haven't already, please do sponsor me as I've ALMOST hit my target with just three weeks left to go:  http://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/marathonmadness

Thank you so much! xx