My oh my it has been a while! Ellie and I have really been slacking! I can't believe how quickly the last few weeks have gone. We now only have 21 days till the half marathon. That's THREE WEEKS TODAY! Excuse me while I go and hyperventilate in panic...
Ellie and I have booked our train tickets and our (surprisingly nice looking) hostel for the trip, now all we need to do is get our bums into gear and start training again! We (quite obviously) took some time off for various reasons I shan't go into, but now we need to hoik it up a gear so that we don't suffer too much when it comes to the actual event.
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 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.
So this is my (Ellie) first post for the blog, and today Marie
and I accomplished our first 5 mile run!
Tough is an understatement, naively I thought an extra mile
would not be too strenuous but going from 4 miles to 5 is actually upping the
distance by 2 km and by George, did we feel it. My legs reached the point of no
return; I was unable to stop running, even at the traffic lights (we really are
getting quite serious now). Marie seemed on top form, that’s my girl!
This is now our third week of training and we have realised that Ellie is so much better at running than I am. Yesterday I woke up from a light afternoon slumber to missed calls and texts from Ellie asking if I was going to run. Needless to say no running was done by me yesterday, though Ellie trooped through. Today, I was too scared to run alone (so many weirdos in the French wilderness...), so I made Ellie come running with me. We hit four miles without too much hardship though tomorrow we have to up it to 5 miles. It's going to be interesting. Ellie and I think that this will be when we hit the 'wall' and want to quit, but we WILL NOT! WE WILL PERSEVERE! I nearly lagged today after around 20 minutes, but then when I realised we had reached our university campus (a 15 minute tram journey away!) I suddenly felt like superwoman. It's things like that that keep running interesting!
Today is grim. There is what can only be described as a typhoon raging outside, and I would rather drink a mushroom, kale and courgette milkshake (vom) than go outside. But I didn't run on Friday or Monday as I was meant to due to the fact I had taken a mini holiday back to Manchester for the weekend, so Ellie is making me feel guilty and 'encouraging' me go. She sent me this to inspire me...
If anyone can inspire me to run in the rain it is definitely Ryan Gosling.
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