Oh, I have been a sour old mare, this week.  As ever, my stupid work schedule meant that training had to be wiggled and jiggled and shiggled about more than a spider in an old woman who’d swallowed a fly, in order to accommodate travelling to Edinburgh and back on Tuesday…

This is a gentle week – every fifth or sixth week it’s a good idea to row back slightly on effort and mileage, to give your body a chance to recover.  So the threshold intervals went from 3 sets of 10 minutes to 5 sets of 3 minutes, which gave me a chance to get them done on my way to the train station in the morning.  It’s a route I used to do regularly, but which has been too short to work into my training over the past few weeks, so it was nice to revisit it.  But Oh.  My.  Word! If you think that three minutes should be easier than 10, you (and by ‘you’ I do mostly mean ‘I’!) would be wrong!!  I went flat out for three minutes, five times over.  It was fabulous, but hard hard work! And so I relaxed a little at the end of it and bloomin’ nearly missed my train!

On Tuesday morning, someone in the Run Mummy Run Facebook group posted this race time calculator.  Which has profoundly depressed me.  Having no experience of any race greater than 10k, this indicates that my realistic marathon finishing time would be 5 hours and 15 minutes.  I had been aiming for as close to 4 hours as possible, in my head, with closer to 5 as my very much ‘silver’ goal.  So I do not greatly care to see these data….

However, I have sat myself down, and given myself a very firm talking to… In which I reminded myself that a good part of this whole experience is just that – the *whole experience*.  The getting up and out three times a week; the body conditioning; the cross training; the learning roughly a shit tonne of good theory and putting it into practice.  Watching my stats improve.  Feeling my body getting stronger and more able to cope with the demands I’m putting on it.

And if you look at my activity on Strava, you can see that all those things are happening… I am getting stronger, going further (for time, at least) and getting better at things like hills…

So.  If it takes five hours, it takes five hours.  I went out this morning for an easy 45 minute run – which turned into a 55 minute run because it was cold and I didn’t want to walk the last bit home – and I loved it.  Every glittery, frosty minute of it.  I went an extended round the block from home, finishing up the bastard hill I practice in my continuous hills and I came home glowing, proud, triumphant.  And cold!