More running (but very slowly)

Yesterday morning I took to the lanes of rural Kent in an attempt to push myself a little harder and break the 14km mark. I'm glad to report that I was successful in achieving this goal, but I found it very tough going. The first 9 km were fine, but fatigue and knee soreness started to creep in and I found myself moving barely faster than walking pace. To be honest, if a bus had come past (and I had some money with me) I would have been a sorely tempted to catch a ride.

Of course if you were watching me live on the Internet you may have noticed that I'd suddenly developed an inspired capability to run at 30mph through Hildenborough and down Tonbridge High Street. As I won't have the benefit of buses on the day of the half marathon I decided to tough it out and managed to get back home in a miserable 1 hour 23 mins. Shocking!

If you want to share in my agony, details of the run can be found at the link below:-

http://runkeeper.com/user/grahamtutt/activity/68498456

A while back I promised that I would publish the training guide to which I am loosely adhering.

I am now on week five and am slightly behind schedule due to completely missing week 3 through injury.

I'm not really going for speed, so I've not bothered too much with the whole fast / slow thing, especially because I am taking things very carefully in order to protect my knees. I am, however, trying to build up the distance, so I'll be over-running on a couple of occasions this week (tonight and Wednesday) but will stick with the 45 minute run on Friday so as to rest my legs for a 16km run on Sunday. This leaves me 5km away from a half marathon.

I plan to use the penultimate Sunday to run 10km of the half marathon course including the horrible hill that's at around the 8 mile point. If all goes well that's about as much preparation as I can do. All in all I will have run 27 times in order to prepare - doesn't sound that much really!

Anyway: I'll sign off now. Should you wish to follow my run this evening, I'll be out and about sometime around 18:00.

Until then... Nanoo Nanoo