Oooh! I enjoyed that!

Monday 30th September 2013

Running (20.00 Miles / 03:07:38 / 00:09:23 Per mile / HRZ 2)

Far too much drink!  That was the story of my weekend.
The Tri Club awards dinner on Friday night turned out to be messier than I had anticipated and thanks to Gavin and Jonny, I wound up drinking a canoe load of Starporamen Czech beer.
It was fantastic and we had a brilliant night but I suffered really badly the next day.

By the time we got to Sunday I was feeling better but there was a problem!
My Best friend's baby was being christened and he had "invested" in some fantastic German beers, along with a cheeky little Lithuanian number.
Self control kicked in and I behaved myself a lot better, even though I knew I was off work on Monday as I booked a day of leave.

The plan for today was to get a 20 mile run in and I felt good this morning and hit the road at 8.30AM.
Spurred on by my strong run at the Belfast City Half Marathon, I decided to try to run a bit faster and hold on to my goal marathon pace of 9.30 which would give me around the 4H15M time I am looking for in Dublin.

I decided to make the run this morning in to two separate loops and it worked well for me as I was able to leave an extra drinks bottle  at the half way point.

I worked hard the whole way through the run to maintain my pace but stay controlled, and to be honest it couldn't have gone much better for me.
Everything seemed to click really well and I felt pretty comfortable the whole way through and I managed to come in with an average time below the 9.30 plan at 9.23 per mile. 

As I finished my run I had the rather insane thought that I could go on and do my usual 6 mile loop from home and just carry on and do the full Marathon distance as I was fairly sure I could bring it home in a time well under my PB of 4H21Mins, but I decided not to be stupid and I stopped.

let's leave the full distance until race day.

I have to say that I am feeling good after that run and fairly confident of hitting my goal in Dublin, but as anyone who runs knows - the best laid plans can fall apart very easily, so I will keep my feet on the ground and just work hard for the next few weeks and try to carry on shedding the weight and be the lightest I have ever been at the start of a marathon.  Maybe that'll make the difference for me.