An easy weekend

Saturday - fell run 3.5 hours

After getting up at some daft oclock, I watched the Australian GP qualifying, walked the dogs then drove down to Pooley Bridge to meet Penrith Stu, AKA the Ugly Cowboy who had a route planned for us over the fells East and South of Ullswater.

Beginning at Roehead where there is space to park a few cars (although we only had one each) we trotted along as far as Thornthwaite Beacon with the likes of Arthurs Pike, High Raise, Kidsty Pike etc bagged enroute. The turnaround point was reached in 2 hrs and 1.5 hours later we were back at the cars. Following a few concerns raised on his blog recently it had been my intention today to ensure Penrith Stu knew he was in decent shape and needn't worry about his fitness for his forthcominig BG attempt - so with about an hour to go I 'pretended' I was getting really tired and walked some of the uphills and also stopped several times with very weak excuses.

Overall a pleasant outing and a very welcome break from all those weeks of road based 20+ milers. I need to carefully plan the next 4 weeks now. The final 7 days I will follow the same routine as I always have. The next 3 need to be sharpening weeks. Perhaps just 10 miles hard on Tuesdays but possibly faster than marathon goal pace. Reps need to be shortened to 1k's and 800metres, but the 2mile efforts are still important for another 10 days or so, so I will attempt to incorporate 10/11 minute efforts within Saturdays run in Gelt or around Crosby. For my long run I will probably do 3 laps of Talkin (19.5miles) next Sunday, with a target of getting faster each lap.

Milly is running Wilmslow Half Marathon tomorrow. Last year he ran a 1:17:?? All of our training has been faster than this time last year so I think he should be capable of a faster time tomorrow, but even 1:18:00, if doubled and added to by 10 mins gives a marathon off 2:46 which I reckon he would take.

Penrith Stu asked what my mileage was this week. I had to tot it up in my head and was surprised to realise it was 60 in 5 runs (last Sat to Yesterday), or 50 in 4 runs (last Monday to Tomorrow). If I do decide to have another proper bash at my marathon PB (big IF dependant on comfortably beating 2:45 at London) then I will need to be running at least 6 days per week. Trouble is - to attempt a PB in Berlin this Autumn would require me to train at this current intensity again during the summer and I generally don't get on with hot weather. but to wait for a year until the next London might feel like wasting an opportunity to capitalise on the best fitness I have enjoyed since 2007.