I went out and did a fartlek session on Friday with Mr Pacepusher and Louise and it was okay but my legs were tired and I was no-where near as fast as Monday. Saturday I did Body Attack – I usually have a Sat off but Laura was doing attack for the first time since having the baby so I wanted to go with her. I think I worked a bit hard though considering I was going to be trying to do 18 miles on Sunday for the first time in this build up.
I was cooking for 10 people on Saturday and as usually happens when I do this I hardly eat anything all day and then added to that I had a stressful time getting the meat ready (doesn’t help being vegetarian) and smashed 2 pints of gravy all over the kitchen floor so I was too worn out to eat much dinner either.
I don’t think that helped me this morning. I woke up feeling exhausted and really weird. I was going for 18 miles and Louise 16 so I did 2 miles first. I knew right away something was not right as I felt like I was running as fast as I could but was only doing 11 m/m, which is quite shocking! When I met up with Louise I was distracted and talking and did manage to speed up to averages of 9 1/2 m/m but I was struggling the whole time. It is so frustrating being so much slower than I had been in the build up to New York and I do not think I am going to get that back in time for London.
At just over 10 miles I came to a dead stop, just feeling totally lousy and unable to make my legs move any more. I walked for a bit and Louise came back so I managed to run with her to make it up to 12 1/2 miles but that was as much as I could manage.
Really disapointed as I had really wanted to get up to the 18 mile mark but Louise did almost 16 and that at least brings to same long run mileage so we can struggle on together. Neither of us are feeling particularly confident and are quite annoyed at being so far behind what we were before New York – running 20 miles at sub 9 m/m pace now seems impossible although we did it in October!
