Well I am pooped.

Today we ran 8 miles, once again setting our furthest distance run to date, and we did it in 1 hour 41 minutes. Looking at previous run paces, its a little down on where we should be, but given that Dad missed the 6.5 miler two weeks ago, skipping up to 8 miles was always going to be a bit of a shock to his body and we were never going to beat our best pace, but we weren’t actually too far off: we hit 5 miles in 59 mins, which was just two minutes slower than I’ve done before, and bearing in mind a section of the route we did was very steep uphill, I’m pretty happy with today’s effort.

We’ve had a few problems this week, mainly due to becoming far too relaxed in our training, bordering on lazy. Once we find a route, we tend to run the same one for every midweek training run, and because of this we’ve been getting into the habit of stopping for walking breaks more frequently than we should, and also not pushing ourselves to the full distance we should be running; our midweek runs should be based on running for 30 minutes, rather than a specific distance, but instead we’ve just been doing 2/3 miles and calling it a day, which sometimes is only 20 minutes run time.

We’re also resting too heavily on our walk/run/walk training programme, recommended by RunDisney coach Jeff Galloway, the idea of which being that its ok to walk when you’re tired, because it prevents injury and actually keeps you running at a faster pace than if you try and push through the pain. That said, however, in an ideal world we should be running at least 2/3 miles before needing to take walk breaks, whereas at the moment our lazy habits mean we’re walking 2/3 times in a 2/3 mile run. I know that we’re still not at our fittest, so mistakes are allowed, and we’ve still got ages to go til the races, but I feel like we really should be pushing ourselves more, instead of slacking off.

Ok, rant over..

Next week we’re going to have another week off official training as Mum and Dad are going to be away Monday-Thursday, but I’m going to do a bit of solo training so as not to lose momentum. Until next time!

°o°