Wandering the World

I did the Boston (UK) marathon back in April, and that really hadn’t gone to plan with all the wind and rain on the day. It was probably one of the wettest races I’ve ever done (though maybe not the wettest run overall) as I think it may have been worse than Chicago. It was at least colder anyway, as I remembered Chicago still being warm despite it raining throughout. After Boston, I’d gotten so c …

November 17, 2024

Having had so few short races since 2019, I really needed to find more to do - something to keep me practicing at speed work at a time when it’s not been that fast. Rutland is a place I’ve been interested in running at before, mostly for parkrun, but wanting a fairly local 10K I felt this one would be a good choice. Since GU36, I've not really done any speed work. I've done two parkruns, which ar …

June 22, 2024

The last time we went to Guernsey it hadn’t gone to plan for Carmen due to the eye infection leading to events that required her to pull out of the race early. I can’t imagine it had been an easy decision, but it had been a sensible one. It did however leave her with unfinished business, and the need to return again. I’d taken about twenty minutes off my time, and I was close to a sub-7 hour race. …

May 19, 2024

The entire point of me entering this race again was to force me to run a half marathon between Boston Marathon and Guernsey Ultra 36. So in a way, this was like the first of two tapering runs from my long run at Boston, before my actual target race. With this in mind I didn't really have a target other than to finish the race. Ideally though, the time for doing so should be between 1hr30 and 1hr45 …

May 6, 2024

My first marathon of 2024. Would it also be my last one this year, or would I manage to fit a marathon into the autumn? I think this time around I started training far too late as I didn't have a good base to be working from after having had an easy summer following quite a few months of reduced training from other non-running issues. My half marathon at the end of December was so bad, I knew I'd …

April 28, 2024

Two weeks out from the Boston Marathon (in Lincolnshire), and I should really be doing a marathon-paced half marathon as part of tapering. Instead, having not done a 10K race this year, and this race being one I often do, I decided I may as well do a 10K with about 80% effort. With a decent warm-up and cool-down alongside it; maybe it'd be similar effort to a slower half. At least, that was my rea …

April 14, 2024

After running this race last year, I thought: "never again". Hilly by name, hilly by nature, and 20 miles of it was just more than I felt was needed. However, after deciding to do GU36 one more time, it turned out this would be the perfect training run for it. So that "never again" became "one more time".

March 24, 2024

This year the MK 20 wasn’t quite timed right for me to be doing it, so I needed an alternative. The best time one, and the easiest one for me to get to was the Hillingdon 20 (formerly the Finchley 20). It’s not an area I know that well so I’d be going into this one not really knowing what to expect. My previous 20 milers hadn’t been brilliant this training cycle, but I figured if I could get aroun …

March 26, 2023