The rain had just started to fall when I left the house for my threshold interval session, but I couldn’t wait for it to stop as I knew the cats’ new climbing tree was due for delivery soon and I had to fit in the session and get back before it arrived.

It was only light rain anyway, and it came and went throughout the session which was 4 reps of 8 minutes at threshold effort. It felt like quite a relaxed set of efforts, even though I was bumping up against the upper edge of the heart rate zone, and the reps were pretty consistent too. I had accidentally left auto-lap on after Aztec, set to 1km splits, which confused the watch as it also had each 8 minute rep and 90s recovery down as laps as well.

A little bit of maths and my average pace for each rep came out at 4:44, 4:44, 4:46 and 4:41 min/km. I’ll take that kind of consistency, and the fact that it’s a little bit faster than my marathon pace (which is 4:55 min/km) but it felt comfortable, even in the rain.

Today could have been a very tough long run. It was scheduled to be the longest I have attempted in training to date, lasting 2 hours and 45 minutes. It was going to have the longest amount of marathon pace in it (75 minutes). It was also taking place on Mother’s Day (my mother died in 2008) and on what would have been my father’s birthday (the 7th anniversary of his death is next Friday).

As it turned out it was one of my more enjoyable long runs. It felt better than last week’s long run, which was shorter with less marathon pace in it. My full marathon playlist hadn’t copied over to my ipod, but the tunes that were repeating were good ones. It was lovely and sunny, but not too windy for a change. Best of all I kept seeing people I knew along the way. First it was Robbie and Mark just after the Staple Hill tunnel, then a regular parkrunner (sans his ubiquitous German Shepherd) as we waited on opposite sides of the road for the lights at Warmley. On the way back I crossed paths with Helen just before I tackled a cattle grid and a nasty hill, then just before I hit the Fishponds fish there were Martha and Daryl (Daryl riding the support bike while Martha ran).

It was great to see so many familiar faces whilst out on another solitary long run. Not too long now until I can see them more regularly back at my usual training sessions. Only two more proper long runs to go.

It is less than 5 weeks to go now (eek!) and recovery runs are a thing of the past. Instead I get a full day off on a Monday (with stretching), so my first run of the week is 20 minutes of threshold effort out and back along the railway path.

A gloriously sunny day for it today, though still a little bit nippy, so it called for sunglasses plus buff to cover all of the bases. I didn’t give it full welly, sticking to the middle of the heart rate zone rather than bashing up against the limit, which meant it still felt comfortable coming off of Sunday’s long run. We are now approaching the full maranoia zone of attempting to stave off all possible injuries and illnesses.

It was back to marathon training with a vengeance this morning, and back to the railway path for 4 reps of 5 minutes at as fast as I could go. There was still a bit of fatigue in the legs and in the upper back (from driving my arms at the weekend to keep my pace up), but I gave it everything I had, even into the headwind on the way back.

This is the same session I had just over a week ago, so I’m able to do a direct comparison of the two sessions (even though they were run at opposite ends of the railway path). Somewhat surprisingly, particularly after the weekend’s efforts, this session was faster. Whereas last week I managed an average pace of 4:06, 4:06, 4:09 and 4:04 min/km for the reps, this time I managed 4:06, 4:07, 4:06 and 3:58 min/km. I’m not sure where that last one came from as I was all in at that stage. I’ll take the improvement though.

I got an extra rest day this week because of the Bath Half on Sunday and looking ahead I’m going to be getting the Monday after my Sunday long runs off every week. This means a slight rearrangement of my schedule and I’m now probably going to be confused as to what day of the week it is.

A gentle jog along the railway path to get the legs moving again, no niggles just a slight soreness in my quads (there must have been a bit more downhill than I realised on Sunday), followed up with a good stretch to get everything back in line. Now my strength and conditioning is moving from Tuesday to Wednesday I have the opportunity to do Body Pump again, but I think it’s going to be too much on my legs so have decided to stick to body weight exercises and do Body Balance instead. Looking forward to getting back to it.