Freezing the balls...

Time for the annual trip to the Brass Monkey Half-Marathon in York. Despite missing last years event due to a cold I still wasn't really prepared for this years event either.

I've not done too much running of late and my run speed is well down on what it was. I have been trying to adopt a different run style which so far has permitted me to run for 60 minutes without any issues but has hampered my speed. I have persevered with this for four months now and have finally decided that it will not provide me with the run speed I require for this year.

I decided to adopt the Maitre Jacques approach to pre-race preparation (without the chemicals). So after seafood and wine and a beer and a late night, I decided to skip the wife and daughter threesome (you couldn't make this up). Jacques was legendary for all this although some suggest that it was more PR propaganda than fact.

Anyway, I lined up dehydrated and ready to go. The warm up consisted of sitting in the car putting my gloves on. It wasn't that cold, in fact it turned out nice again as George Formby would say. As you can tell, my heart wasn't really in it. This was simply a training run with a number on.

I was due to run With Jonny C (of Singpore and Reindeer fame). The plan was to get round in 01:28 although anything under 01:30 would have been deemed acceptable. So we did, as planned and ran a very even pace for the first 11 miles before "dropping the bomb" with 2 miles to go.

01:26 = Job done. 3 minutes short of a PB but it was good to get a long run in and the post race high on the way home was worth those 86 minutes.

No need to panic, the key race of the year isn't until August but it's time to get my arse in to gear a bit more now. Still time to miss sessions but maybe get a little more focus.