97 miles for the week. 13 runs, including a session of hill circuits, 8x8 sec hill blasts, 14 miles with 4 miles uphill at threshold effort, and 8x100m hill sprints. Pleased with the week, in fact, I'd say that this was my best week of training since I started. I felt strong and was well able for all the sessions and I recovered well between the workouts. That said, there's room for improvement. Although the training went well this week and I felt strong, I'm still lacking 'proper' speed. I'm hoping the strength work will help when I turn on the speed. On the news front, I've decided to run the inaugral Tralee International Marathon on the 16th Mar 2013 - 4 months away. That wasn't part of the plan but marathon fever's taken over Tralee and I'm going to give it a go. This is a bad idea. But sometimes you have dive in and see what happens. So, I've changed the training. I'm going to keep working on the strength endurance, which will hopefully help with improving the speed before I get stuck into the longer speed stuff. Plus, the Tralee marathon is a very tough course of rolling hills - so the hill work should help. If I had an extra 8 weeks and was running on a flat course, I'd aim for sub 2:30. Because the course is tough and I don't have enough time to get the base speed in, I'm going to aim for 2:37 (not too bad, for a first marathon on a hard course, aged 48). After the marathon, I will focus on getting my 5k down. | 