I'm writing this from my garden. The barbecue is on the go, I have a beer in front of me and the cricket on my ipad (England vs Australia, although with all due respect to my Aussie friends, it's not much of a contest at the moment).
The weather has been glorious. Maybe a little bit too glorious. Britain is in the middle of a heatwave. I feel sorry for those runners who like to run in the evening. The radiation heat off the pavement built up during the day must be dreadful. Fortunately I run in the morning. It's generally cool although the thermometer has topped out at 20C at 6am which is basically unheard of in the UK. Even so, I've not missed one training run yet which makes a difference from my last marathon where I must have missed about two weeks' worth of running in the 16 week programme.
My runs are getting longer and longer, even in midweek. This week I had to run an 11 mile midweek run which meant me having to get up at 5:15am just to get out of the door by 5:45am. These extra miles have made a noticeable difference though. Normally a long weekend run would seem quite daunting but due to the midweek runs being in double figures mileage-wise the weekend runs are not really much of a deal.
This morning I had to run 18 miles. I had a bit of a hangover (went out for lunch yesterday and then stopped off in a pub on the way home and got sidetracked by a blues festival in our local park which we stopped to watch for a couple of hours with more beers naturally!). My back has also been a bit poorly this week. I have pulled a muscle on the left shoulder blade and it has been annoying me for the last four days. It does that clicking noise every time I rotate my shoulder when I think it should be helping to sort out the pain but probably does nothing at all.
Anyway, I set off this morning on an 18 miler. I had planned a route to take me down to cross Kew Bridge run along the south Thames Path all the way to Putney Bridge, cross over and head back to Ealing via Hammersmith and Chiswick. The first two miles were a bit of a struggle as I had a bit of difficulty finding my pace. Once I did though it clicked. And not just in "Oh this is a nice pace" but in the way that you want to run for ages. You feel like this is the best run you've ever done and what a great day to choose to come out and run along the Thames to see it in the morning when it is at it's best. I ran over Putney Bridge and decided then and there to come back along the north Thames Path to take me back along the Thames to Kew Bridge and home to Ealing. I love those sort of runs and I really feel that it's because of the new training plan that my fitness is greater and why this run felt so great. I'm looking forward to next week's 20 miler. I just have to decide what route I want to take. If I can make it as half as good as this morning's route then I will be one happy camper.
Here's the route map:
