The Second Ten Miler

Around 14 of us took off this morning at 8am, for another 10 mile run. This was only my second attempt at this distance, and after indulging myself over the last week on Holidays, I was a little bit apprehensive.  Ray wasn't with us this morning, but I believe he's burning up the roads on the continent, with all the running he's doing over there.  John set the route, in that we would run out the Ross road for 5 miles and then turn around and run back. The unfortunate thing for the other runners, was that John stayed running with me, and I was of course, lagging behind the others, so when we'd gone the 5 miles, the rest of the group had gone a good bit further. John let a shout and we turned around and ran home, automatically promoting me to leading the field! I felt strong on the way home, and was able to pick up the pace a bit, and I finished the 10 miles in a time of 1 hour 43 min exactly, 1 minute and 44 seconds quicker than last week. So the progress curve is still pointing up.

I've decided that I'm going to enter for the Dublin City Marathon in October. I was chatting John this morning about what sort of training would I need to do, to be able to finish it. His advice was, once more, fairly comprehensive, but the gist of it is, to continue what I'm doing, but step up the long runs on the weekend.  I've 12 weeks to the Marathon, and The Tullamore Harriers Half Marathon will fit perfectly into my schedule. In fact it's a great spring board, as I'd now be very disappointed if I couldn't finish the Half Marathon, due to the progress I've made to date. I'm completely surprised by that, as only 5 or 6 weeks ago, I thought trying to run a half marathon with only 10 weeks training, was a little bit bonkers.

I've included a few pictures below. The first one is of Hugo and Myself getting out of the sea, after cooling off, having completed a run. I was trying to recreate the Daniel Craig pose from James Bond, but I'm not going to show you those attempts. I guess the camera can only take what's in front of it, and what was in front of it was far from Daniel Craig!  The other picture's are a poor attempt by me to try and capture some of the scenery from where we were running. It honestly looked much better in real life.  Until Tue, Slán.