The third challenge by michael_h

Today I all but completed training for my first race in 17 months with a 5 mile tempo run. With the exception of a 3 mile jog on Sunday, that's me done and dusted and ready for race 3 of the Yateley 10K series next Wednesday. And judging by today's run, it's going to be a struggle.

I was aiming to run the middle 3 miles at my target race pace, around 9:20 - as it turned out I ran them at 9:18, 9:16, and 9:15 - but that was pretty much full throttle for me today. Whether I was still recovering from Sunday's fairly hard run 7 miles or whether it was due to the warmer weather - I was silly enough to run at midday with temperatures around 24C - I don't know but any thought of running well under 60 minutes have now been consigned to fantasy land. Especially as it's possible the temperature might be nudging the late 20s next week.

I started training w/b 18th April having previously run only twice since mid-November 2010 - those being measly 2 mile efforts. In the 14 weeks since, 145 training miles will have been completed come Sunday in 38 runs - I've missed just 4 runs during that time. In an ideal world, I would have liked to have run a couple more 6 mile tempo runs and a couple of 8 mile LSRs but aside from that I've pretty much done the training I set out to do.

So, time to wrap myself in cotton wool for the next 6 days and make sure I get to the start line. The anticipation is building already...

Enjoy your running!