Must admit I've been worried about feeling tired recently - the combination of my manic job where I'm on my feet all day, every day, rushing around like the proverbial headless chicken, and marathon training has been tough, as I'm sure everyone is finding!

I was starting to think that I'll have to crawl around on April 25th, but tweaking the training programme so that I've had a few rest days appears to have helped! It's meant that I have had to train on my own for most of this week :-( but I've felt a lot better and I've run better during training sessions.  It's also made me feel (a little bit) more confident about feeling fresh enough to do the marathon after our taper period, but I'm going to have to conquer some serious self-doubt, too!

I'm able to have an extra day off today (woo-hoo!) as I went a bit mad on last night's Ellesmere group training session.  I comfortably managed the first half at tempo-run pace (ticking the box for session number 1!), and as we always have "efforts" (sprints & hills) in the second half, I got rid of my fartlek session too!  We're grouped/paired with similar ability runners for our efforts to ensure we push ourselves appropriately, and I really got the short end of the straw this week!  Rather cruelly, I was teamed up with very fit, very fast 16 year old boys!!  You can't imagine how chuffed I was with myself to a) keep up with young lads less than half my age and b) to see that the pace I hit on my Garmin during the session was my fastest in a number of years! (There's life in the old girl yet!!!)

I think the moral of this week's training is that rest is just as important as clocking up the miles!

Good luck to everyone racing/running LSR's this weekend!

Mandy xxx