Last week

It's half term in England this week, which finds me at my parents' house for a few days with the kids. One of the reasons we wanted to move from Scotland to England was so that we could travel more easily to see our families, and I am putting this into practice now! So far since arriving on Sunday I've enjoyed some shopping, quite a bit of reading, an evening in the pub with old school-friends, good sleep and one run. It's good to recharge the batteries a bit.

Last week Emma's nursery took an extra day's holiday, which got in the way of my usual bike ride on Friday. I also got a bit of a cold, and felt pretty rough over the weekend, so I missed a planned run.

However, last Monday I had an excellent run! I increased my long run from the previous week, and did 7.2 miles. Incredibly, this is the furthest I have run since 19th September 2010 (the Great North Run I hobbled with a bad foot). It was great to up my mileage at last, and I really enjoyed the run.

After that I had a great 13 mile bike ride on Tuesday, and then I ran with the local group on Thursday evening. That turned out to be a Paarlauf session - something I'd never tried (or indeed heard of) before. Basically each runner is paired up with someone of a similar ability, and you take it in turns to run loops. So my partner ran a hard loop round the block, then tagged me and I ran a similar loop. While she was running, I was jogging back to my starting point as recovery.

It was quite hard. I ran each lap with 3 others, and my partner and I started at the back of each pack. Then I had a burst of energy in the middle, and overtook into second position. We maintained that for most of the session but I flagged badly on the last few laps and was a distant last by the final lap! It was good fun to do something new, and made me push myself.

And that was it for the week, so only 2 runs and 1 bike ride due to circumstances beyond my control. I was pleased to have increased my long run at last though, and I hope to go longer again this week!