How's it going?

Since I mentioned marathon training on the blog and forum, some people have been asking me how I've been getting on. Fairly well so far, and thanks for asking! Obviously someone reads this after all.

I've only been going for 2 weeks, though, and at first it was very much a shock to the system. I was exhausted after the first week, but managed some enforced recovery in and around a hotel swimming pool in the south of France, when we went out there for a wedding. That caused its own problems, of course, since I couldn't manage a long Sunday morning run when a) I had no idea where any of the roads went, and b) we didn't even leave the wedding until 3am, so Sunday morning didn't even exist.The solution to that problem was to go for a 5 mile run (Lindsay's already blogged this, so I'll steal her link ) before leaving France on the Monday, then do another 13 back home. I hope that did me some good, because I really didn't feel great doing it.

I had a similar problem this weekend - after another wedding (and not the last this month), I was at the in-laws with no real idea about suitable long routes to get through 18 miles. However, I was shown an 8-mile loop by brother-in-law Simon, so a couple of laps of that with some extra bits added was probably enough (I don't want to measure it and find out it was short).

But probably the best thing to come out of the marathon training is a little Wednesday night training group: me, Tash and James running around the country lanes south of Hitchin (although probably not for much longer, with the evenings drawing in). James isn't training for a marathon, just (even more) running fitness. Tash is probably training for a marathon, if she'd ever work out which marathon she wants to do...