Hurdle #10000

When my brother, Franck, decided to run two half marathons at the beginning of the year, all he had to do was sign up, train, turn up on the day and have fun. So you would think the same would apply in France. But no. This is France, where even the simple is not, in fact, simple.

How I imagine most French people react when naïve foreigners think things will be simple in France.

7 miles is no small feat

If you couldn't guess by the imaginative title, we've hit the 7 mile mark! Yes, week 5 of the training programme and we’re halfway through a half marathon!

The run itself was nothing short of dramatic, we started slow, my legs felt stiff, Marie had a stitch and we had 4 miles of river to run before we could even contemplate turning back. So, we expected a slow and steady 7 miler and when we found ourselves in the middle of nowhere aka Gières, a suburb of Grenoble, with a unappealing view of a motorway we were overjoyed to turn around and run the 3 miles back home. Neither of us could really handle stopping, the pain and the loss of rhythm is all too much to bear these days, so we just kept running.

Incredibly, our pace increased from 11 minutes per mile to around 9 minutes a mile and as it turns out, it was our fastest run, completing 7 miles in 1 hour 9 minutes and 58 seconds!

But such grand achievements don’t come without sacrifice, I had to submerge myself in a cold bath afterwards which was truly truly horrible. In the words of Kate Bush « If I only could, be running up that hill, with no problems ».

Ellie x

Glam Pams hit the slopes

Ellie and I have clearly been slacking on our blog posting, it's been a while! After our run last Monday Ellie's shins were causing here a lot of pain, which we believe to have been shin splints. Not ideal during half-marathon training! Dr Allen (aka Molly) prescribed rest, so on Wednesday I ran solo. I am TERRIBLE at running alone, and my GPS on my phone went haywire and told me I'd ran 2.5 miles when I was 100% sure I had only reached 1, so that threw me off track a little. Anyway, as I ran the same path as usual I have calculated that I ran about 5.8 miles, which is very impressive considering I usually need Ellie there to spur me on, and only a few months ago a 1km run would absolutely floor me. But it is week 4 of training so I'd be very disappointed if I was still so unfit. As I ran the sun was setting and I had some cheeky breaks to take some photos. It's always nice to be reminded just how beautiful nature can be.