Jack Frost nipping at your bloody hands!

The first really, really cold morning of the winter and (luckily?) i was walking rather than cycling into work. The last time i cycled when it was really cold my hands went numb, despite the fact i was wearing gloves – possible due to my awful circulation, my shins went bright red and my cheeks felt like they’d frozen. Probably just me being a huge wuss though.

I’ve realised that it is time for me to ‘up the mileage’ if i want to stand any chance of meeting my current target of completing the marathon in under 4 hours 15 minutes. The slightly scary thing about all this is, i’ve never (knowingly) run further than 8 miles yet i need to be regularly running that, at a minimum, on a nigh daily basis by the end of the winter.

My first mental block is to work out how far that actually is, i want to be doing two 10 mile runs, a 5 mile and a ‘long slow’ run per week by the end of january. I’m currently happily doing a couple of 6.5 milers mixed in with a 4 miler and a longer run when i can find the time at a weekend but the ease of that schedule is that i have pre-planned routes for these runs, i’m going to need to work out something new to meet my new targets as i don’t fancy just doing circuits of a route i already do. i sometimes find the monotony of running the hardest thing to overcome and new routes should hopefully help compensate for the fact i’m going to be running for hours at a time.

i’ve also been pondering the prospect of doing some speedwork but in all honesty i don’t think i’d be able to motivate myself to actually do any, it’s hard, boring and i’d be doing it on my own – no thanks!

if anyone has a decent running route that i could do from horsforth in leeds please pipe up! i contemplated retracing part of some of my bike rides but they’re all pavement-free roads and i think i’d get squished fairly quickly.

Music – i had a rediscovering of Jimmy Eat World the other day, fab.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GI8neuhPm_0]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *