There has been some awesome running from Realbuzz members just lately and I have enjoyed following the up's and down's on the road to glory . For me it has been mainly down's from last Summer onwards with one injury after another and it has only been in the past 12 weeks or so that I have got back to intense training . I am following a 12 week plan leading up to the Reading half marathon and I have to say fingers crossed it is all going quite well . Luckily i was able to put in a few double figure runs before the plan had begun and I think this has really helped with the longbase . Where i am still behind is the overall speed . The plan incorporates 3 fast session every 3rd weekend and one speed session midweek and I am slowly increasing the pace each time , so much so that my last 8 mile run at threshold was completed under 8 minutes per mile which I am very happy with at this stage . I was reading Rob's blog the other day and he mentioned running his 10k PB in 42 minutes and wondering if he would ever get near that again . I have been feeling the same about my half marathon PB . I had a purple patch starting from October 2014 to March 2015 where I felt so quick and 'on it ' , and i have never been able to attain those times since . Injury has played it's part but i also feel something is missing in my approach to training so i had a look back at my blogs and training records and i noticed that i was simply running more often and doing far more cross training ( and eating less pizza ! ) . So it is time to get serious , earlier nights , no sugar and more cross training and so far it is all going well . I just hope it continues in this vein becuase I am not ready to throw in the towel . As far as running races go I have only signed up for Reading and the London 10000 . MK marathon was in my sights but I still don't feel brave enough to attempt another marathon at the moment and I am still focused on getting that flipping half marathon time down again . I did consider the Royal Parks but have you see how much they are charging ? 58 quid for a half marathon !!!??? With running becoming so popular now I guess we are going to see a lot more of this in the future , I know Royal Parks is always over subscibed so the organisers think they can charge what they want. With train tickets thats close to £100 for me so they can forget it , I am not that deperate for a Royal parks t-shirt . If all goes to plan I will probably run the Mablethorpe half instead as I sadly couldn't do it last year due to my achilles issue . Nice and flat that one and the crowds are super supportive . And it is less than half the price of Royal Parks . So that leaves the middle of the year which is not really my favourite time for running if it is too hot but I might consider a race in early September if there is any thing about . Are any of you considering the Birmingham International marathon in October ? It looks like it will be a top class event as it is run by the Great run people but there is a massive looped section that puts me off and I know others who feel the same . What do you guys think ?

So that's it for now and I won't leave it so long before my next blog !  

Have a great running weekend everyone 

Sean