Since I did my long crazy run on the Saturday, my rest day was moved to Sunday. Meaning Monday it was go, go ............. go! I went to Pollock Park to do a speed session of 6 x 800m with 100m recoveries, although I think I was doing closer to 900m reps with 1 mile warmup and warm down. The session went well and felt recovered from Saturdays exploits and got quicker throughout the session. Tuesday was an easy 6 miler which I did within in the hour.
Then Wednesday I was ready for my 10 mile tempo run at hopeful marathon pace. This run started badly and got worse. My right thigh was sore from the off but managed the first mile in 8.17, which I was surprised with as I felt I was taking it easy, mile 2 I did a similar time but then it felt like there was nothing left in the tank on top of my sore thigh. So I decided to cut the run short and walk back. A cut short run here and there is not going to affect my overall training, but if I continued on and my thigh got worse I would have regretted it, especially since all the work I have put in to this.
Thursday was another adventure up to Fort William with friend Steven. Steven was still a bit down after falling short of completing the Three peaks challenge the previous week so wanted to take it out on Ben Nevis! So we set off at a brisk pace and managed to maintain it up the whole 5 miles to the summit. It is a pretty easy path, or should I say a motorway! in path terms. It is reasonably wide all the way up and obviously there are steep bits but its pretty easy walking if you've done a few munros before. Made it up to the summit in 2 hours 5 minutes which is the same time it took me to do Ben Lomond which is about 500m lower than Ben Nevis. The views from the top were fantastic! We spent a good half an hour taking it all in....
and then there was the descent, letting gravity take over we were back down in 1 hour 35 minutes. Meaning a round trip of 3 hours 40 minutes.
Took Friday as a rest day and had intended to do an easy run on Saturday. However had a few too many lemonades on Friday night so didn't get to sleep till late and had a lie in instead.
Finally Sundays long run starting at 8am. I did Old castle road hill to start off with then headed to Eaglesham and kept going. I'm still not too sure if I turned back too early or not as there was so many roads turning off that I couldn't remember which one to turn back at. However I worked out if it was the wrong one the maximum lost mileage would be 2 miles, still an 18 miler. However the second half I did pick it up and my time was 3.06.30, so I reckon I must have done more than 18 and closer to 20 miles, as there is no way I was doing more than 10 minute miles for the whole time! So I'll call it a 20 ish!
So that rounds off the hard training with 5 long runs spanning more than 100 miles! and plenty of miles in between. Now its taper time, which means backing off a bit and letting my muscles recover and hopefully peak 2 weeks today! More importantly now the physical training is done, its now time to look at the mental training. This is going through all the possible scenarios on race day, where I want to be when etc. Also a technique I use for long runs is splitting up the run into chunks and only concentrating on one chunk at a time and occasionally thinking a head to the next one. Obviously the hill from Dores has been on my mind and I am visualising myself running strong up it.
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