It’s been a fairly intense week for me this week. Since the Karrimor run last Sunday I’ve run 34 km (21 miles) in four sessions. A modest amount perhaps, but not for me. I still seem to be free of gout and my toe joints are almost fully recovered.

The big tick is that the long run was over 16 km…ten miles. Only three more for a half marathon!

All of those miles have been in barefoot shoes – Evos and Breathos – and I’m now pretty confident that I can run a half marathon in them (the Evos). I did get a bit of a bruise when I repeatedy managed to find a pointy stone on consecutive laps of the lake; it all goes to toughen me up though.

For the technically minded, the plan for the week was:

10 easy; 15 tempo; 15 easy 6.35 km 10 easy; 4x(2 fast/3 easy); 10 easy 6.44 km 30 easy (with my 11 year old daughter) 4.27 km 115 easy 16.86 km

The coming week will be more difficult to organise – I’m going to the Rowing World Cup for a long weekend, so I’ll have to find somewhere to do a long run near Eton Dorney. Hopefully I’ll be able to do a speed session up the side of the lake. I got a bit ahead of myself with today’s long run – I was supposed to run for 90 mins, but the draw of 10 miles was too much for me. I’ll probably drop back down to 90 minutes for an easy time next Sunday.

I used today’s run to try out a gel. Bleah….never again. Well actually I have one more that I’m very reluctant to use – strawberry and banana flavour. I do have to admit that the energy/caffeine bit worked okay and kept me going almost to the end of my run but I had to drop to run/walk for the last half kilometre. I think in future I’ll be sticking to jelly babies.