Long Hard Slog

When I tell people that I'm going to run some insane distance of a weekend, they usually raise an eyebrow, mutter something about the state of my mental health and then ask me if I "feel better" for all the running. Well, here's the answer to that question - no. No, I don't feel better. My legs hurt, I've had a cough since Christmas that won't go away and I'm being shafted at work which makes getting up in the morning to go running all the more difficult. However, going on a long run at the weekend is a joy. Getting out of the house and running to some random place or other (OK, so it's not literally random, we usually have a destination in mind before we set out) is incredibly motivating - you get to see new things and places you haven't been before and, best of all, if you are running somewhere new, you don't know where all the mile markers are!

Our midweek runs are a different matter. As I already alluded to, getting out of work before midnight is a challenge at the moment, and that's making getting up before noon even more of a challenge! James and I have discussed our lack of motivation for midweek runs at length. We think that following the snowy and icy period over the New Year, we haven't managed to quite get back into the swing of things. As the long runs have got longer, our enthusiasm for a 3-mile morning saunter has dwindled and we're trying to find ways to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and sprint off into the distance. So far, we've determined that we need to sort out our nutrition (yes, 60-65% of a training diet should come from carbs but no, the carbs shouldn't all come from wine gums, cola and chocolate) and we think we need some new routes to run on our shorter runs - as they say, variety is the spice of life.

Another thing to try that I found while traversing the Internet the other day is a new type of interval training. I say new - it's probably been around for donkeys' years, but its new to me, and it's so simple (when you know how) that I'm slightly concerned that I didn't think of it myself. It's called Pyramid Intervals and the idea is that after a 5 minute warm-up jog, you run hard for one minute, easy for one minute, hard for two minutes, easy for two minutes, and so on up to five minutes (but keeping the recoveries at two minutes), and then back down again to one minutes. As sad as it sounds, I'm actually quite excited about this newfangled idea and can't wait to try it out - it can't be any worse than repeating the same intervals (4 mins hard, 2 mins easy) over and over again... can it?

Another thing that appears to be stagnating at the moment is our fundraising total - we hit £1,245 over a week ago and haven't raised a penny since. If you'd like to help us get out of a fundraising rut, please go to http://www.justgiving.com/bbjamarathon to give us a hand!