Weekly Summary

Weekly mileage: 67.47 miles
Profile: 100% steady road-running, average pace 9.31mm
Longest run: 15.15 miles at 9.25mm pace. And it felt quite long enough!
Niggles: [Takes a deep breath.]
Monday - Woke at 3am to pee warm beetroot juice. Found some Cefaclor, expiry date August 2006. Took three-day course properly. It worked.
Wednesday - strange crampy pain around my left heel, mostly laterally. Came on about a mile into a run, was quite uncomfortable for a mile or two, then eased off. Was still there on Thursday morning but disappeared as soon as I started Thursday afternoon's run and hasn't come back.
Wednesday, after run - nail from third toe on my left foot came off in my hand. Nailbed fine, with healthy new nail growing in.
Thursday evening - tripped over a speck of dust in the dark and measured my length on the pavement. Took skin off right knee and left elbow, and still haven't retrieved the last piece of grit from my left hand.
Saturday - Slight tenderness at the front of both ankles.
(I'm OK, really I am!)
Sofa-spud days: None, but Monday and Saturday were "easy" days.

A good week. Lots of comfortable miles at target pace, and an increase in the length of my longest run. Although doing races as training is an enjoyable strategy, the mental toughness that comes from doing those solitary long training runs is important if I'm going to be prepared to run marathon after marathon mostly on my own.

I'm also planning to do my long training runs at planned marathon pace rather than plodding them out more slowly. Or, more accurately, I'm planning to do the 10-in-10 at a long-training-run effort-level. I may twiddle around with the pace on some of my other runs, but those long runs will remain around 9.30mm.

Next weekend will involve training by running must-do races. So I plan to cut back in the early part of the week, a process likely to be helped by the fact that for the next fortnight I won't be working on my doorstep with a long break between sessions.