I’ve been on leave this week. Kath has been working and it has been a busy busy week for her. Dad is staying with us and we’ve been going on little day trips here and there. I was wondering how the running would fit into our lives when we’re not in our usual routine but it worked fine. We even went for 3 maintenance runs this week rather than the 2 – I feel better about no longer having a gap on the training schedule!

So here’s what we did

Tuesday: A relatively good pace for us of 12.14 minutes per mile running a total of 3.68 miles. I can’t even remember which way we went. I think we went up past the sheep and then along the canal but I couldn’t be sure. I don’t remember much about the run really.

Wednesday: We left our house, went down the hill and then along the canal towards Bingley. It felt really hard and I didn’t really enjoy it much. Having said that I must be getting better because in spite of not enjyoing it, I did see quite a lot. Dogs playing and getting their owners all tangled up, the acknowledging nods of other runners, the many cyclists who came flying past, ducks, a swan or two and Hugo the heron. It was, it turns out our fastest 45 minute run to date. 11 and a half minutes per mile exactly. 3.91 miles. We have gone faster once but that was on a 3 miler. This is encouraging!

Friday: Yesterday was a mixed bag. We tried out our new backpack/hydration system (more on that later) and I was struggling with a slightly dodgy tummy on the run (more on that later too). We slowed down a bit and ran 3.61 miles at a pace of 12.24 minutes per mile. It was a bit of a struggle particularly at first. With 6 run sections to go we turned for home along the canal and I settled into a really nice steady rhythm. It actually seemed easier to just keep going rather than stopping to walk and start again and the even rhythm was settling my tummy down. So I kept going, and going, and going and the first time I thought ‘a little walk would be nice’ there was only one left and it seemed a bit silly to take that one. So we ran to the end. 18 minutes of solid running at a completely even pace with just a little bit of an increase in speed for the last 30 seconds. And the most encouraging thing: I didn’t feel like I absolutely had to stop. I could have kept plodding along at that pace for a while I think.

The runs this week have been really tough mentally and physically but also really enouraging. Our early ‘really fast’ pace is now our normal ‘running fairly hard but looking about’ pace and our fast pace is getting faster. We are also getting stronger and are able to sustain our slower place for much longer. And, importantly for me and my ‘you can’t do this’ gremlins, our slowest, ‘dragging our butts up steep west yorkshire hills’ pace is still faster than the minimum pacing requirement of 16minutes per mile for the RunDisney Marathon.

Next up – 7 miles tomorrow. I’m not dreading it.