Weekly summary

Weekly mileage: 58.67 miles
Profile: 65.5% road-running, average pace 9.20mm
34.5% hill-walking, average pace 29.55mm
Longest run: 12.1 miles at 9.27mm pace
Niggles: Blister developed on left big toe on Tuesday. Didn't affect training. Now painfree.
Sofa-spud days: Monday.

Leon and I had a great weekend in the Lake District. Despite Martcrag Moor attempting to swallow him whole, Leon performed not too badly for a first-time fell-racer in the Langdale Horseshoe Fell Race (and I still can't help thinking I *might* have been able to make that Esk Hause cut-off).

Unlike Leon, I'm not a fell-runner. On rough terrain, I'm a feeble ascender and a cowardly descender. Mostly, I'm a road runner. When I go out on the hills, I'm a hill-walker who wears fell-shoes and sometimes runs the easy bits. It has been suggested to me that it's misleading to log my hill-walking trips as training mileage and that they shouldn't feature in my training log at all. To which I say, firstly, it's bad manners to be disrespectful about anyone's training apart from your own, and, secondly, stomping over hills with a 5-6kg rucksack is resistance-training by stealth, and is a great deal more sustainable than doing leg-presses in the gym.

If I'm deluding myself, well, it's worth it :o)

Today, we talked about how essential it is that we build as much functional physical strength and endurance as we can for the 10-in-10. The characteristics we'll need to be able to run 10 marathons at a reasonably consistent pace are not the same as those we'd need to target one marathon for a fast time.

Incidentally, our blog picture was taken one year ago today, when, with Leon at my side, I ran my fastest marathon to date - 3:44:10 by the clock, on an undulating course at Leicester. The objective was to get a qualifying time for both London and Boston in 2009 - something Leon had achieved two weeks earlier with a 3:11:12 marathon in Berlin. We subsequently decided that we didn't fancy London (great event though it undoubtedly is) and couldn't afford to go to Boston.