Sunday, Week 2 of 15

Run: "10 Miles, Slow"
Time Taken: 83 mins
Total Mileage So Far: 57 miles

Week 2:
Total Weekly Mileage: 32.5 miles
Time running: 4 hrs 14 min

On my mp3 player this week:
Elbow - Leaders Of The Free World
Hard-Fi - Stars Of CCTV

Yesterday was fantastic; cloudless blue skies, dry and windless. So it was a surprise to get up at 7:45am to thick fog and a thick frost. Don't know why I would be surprised.

Found myself being extremely grateful for two out of the three purchases I made for my birthday to help my training be less painful - the long sleeved base layer which is about a molecule thick but somehow keeps me warm on below-zero days like this, and the dayglo gloves which allow me to actually think about something other than how numb my hands are.

Once I got down onto the canal though, it was suddenly all OK. The fog was the heavy kind that leaves icy drips on your eyelashes and the visibility was about 50 yards which made my run feel like...
a) (Geek simile)... a computer game with the draw distance turned down.
b) (Non-geek simile)... a Caspar David Friedrich landscape.

As I ran along, swans with their dirty cygnets, buzzing electricity pylons, occasional runners and the sewage works reared up out of the mist until I got to the turning point of the railway bridge at 41 mins and turned and ran back. Apart from a bit of cramp on the outside of my left foot, I felt better as the run went on, probably because it took so long to warm up.

I was using the third of my birthday items for the first time - an 'O' shaped running bottle, and found it hard to get any liquid out of it, until I remembered my dad's advice for drinking a yard of ale - something to do with the angle of tilt to allow it to flow properly. I'm not convinced he knew I would use the knowledge 25 years later when training for a marathon, but it seemed to work.

Completed the whole thing in just under 8:30 min/miles, which I try to tell myself is a good pace for a slow run.

Rest day tomorrow - back with another killer interval session on Tuesday.