A Positive Couple of Weeks

I've finally got round to sorting out a long overdue blog update. The good news is that things have gone pretty well over the last couple of weeks. Thank you to everybody who has sponsored me so far - with minimal effort on my part to publicise the JustGiving page you've already managed to get me up to £220!

I have no doubt that I'll make my initial £500 target with no problems, and I'm excited to see how far past that I can go!!

I also got hold of a few photos from the Wings For Life run the other weekend, and for those of you who aren't on Facebook here they are (you hopefully can work out which one was taken after I'd been caught by the car! And yes, that man really was having a chat on his mobile as we ran!).

So, to bring things up to date on the training front... I had concerns about my left knee following Wings For Life and decided to rest up for a week. Therefore my next activity was last Saturday, and rather than a long run I decided to dust off my road bike (which included removing some significant cobwebs) and ride out to Wimpole for Parkrun. My knee didn't feel too bad on the 5km run, so I decided to take the scenic route home.

Although I cycle to and from work every day, I'm not sure my cycling legs were quite up to a combined 60km ride plus a 5km run, even on the flat roads of Cambridgeshire, so by the end of the ride I was going rather slowly!

Since I couldn't really afford to take another week off running I decided to get back on the road again last week and, despite some initial discomfort with the knee, things fortunately seem to have settled down and I managed to clock up 80km (50 miles) total for the week, 50km of which were split across the weekend, 20km yesterday (half of which was in torrential rain!) and 30km today, in much better conditions. 

This weekend has been particularly satisfying because not only did my legs manage 30km a day after I'd done 20km, but I also felt that I could probably have pushed on for another 10km today if I'd really needed to - hopefully this indicates that I'm becoming more accustomed to the longer distances. I'm currently choosing to ignore the fact that even if I'd done that extra 10km I would still have only covered 90km in the week, still 10 short of the full 100km distance!!

I have a slightly busier week this coming week, so I think it's unlikely that I'll reach the heady heights of 80km again, although the long weekend should give me plenty of opportunity for a couple of good long runs!

As always, thank you for reading, and don't forget to sponsor me if you think I'm doing a good job.

Stephen