20 Miles!

I would be dancing for joy today if my legs weren’t aching so much. I went out this morning with the intention of doing a longish run but not expecting to manage much more than about 13 miles. I slowed my pace, kept plugging on and arrived back home 4 hours later having completed 20 miles. I’m thrilled, overjoyed and incredibly relieved. My longest distance for some time now has been 15 miles and I’ve been finding it extremely difficult to increase that. I’ve arrived home time after time having reached 15 and been crippled for the next 3 days. This time I had no real agenda and just kept running. I passed 13 miles and realised that I was quite some distance away from home. I also realised that I still had some energy left in my legs so could quite happily keep going. I got closer to home and checked my Strava app. It now said that I had run 26.2 kilometres. My goodness thinks I. That seems quite a lot. I taxed my little brain for some time trying to figure out how many miles that may be and all the while the distance I had covered was going up. It’s now 27 kilometres. Well, that’s quite close to 30 so why not go for that. I got to 30 and I’m quite close to home but still had some energy left. Why not make it 32 and then I’m only 10 kilometres from my marathon target.

And so I did.

People have been telling me for some time that if I can manage 18 miles before the London marathon then the adrenalin provided by the crowds and the occasion will push me on for the rest. I’ve now covered 20 miles and reckon I still had a little bit left in the tank. This is such a relief. I now feel that the 26.2 miles is an attainable goal. It has previously always seemed too ridiculously far to even contemplate. Reaching it has now become a very distinct possibility.

This has been quite a week and in other news I got a wonderful gift from one of the people who have donated to my ‘Save The Rhino’ campaign.

Claire Middlehurst popped into my office on Friday with a bottle of tonic. She ran the London Marathon last year and said that one of the most important parts of her training was trying to stay clear of coughs, sneezes and general diseases.I shall be taking regular doses of the tonic to try and ward off the evil lurgi.

Thanks Claire

It’s very much appreciated.

I also went along to Anglia Ruskin University to see the Saucony running shoe folks and try out their new gait analysis machine. They’ve promised to send me the video from the machine so I’ll be writing a little more about this once they send it across.

Meanwhile here’s a little bit of video we shot on the night with my phone

And here’s a pic of the running gait computer. It filmed from 3 different angles. I’m really looking forward to seeing the video it produced.