Not too bad actually.

I had a good weekend, running 4 miles on Saturday and 8 miles on Sunday.  Saturday afternoon taught me not to run in the afternoons on sunny weekends because Hyde Park was so busy.  I was almost taken out (twice) by small people going at lightning speed on scooters (not their fault), numerous tourists on Boris Bikes and once by a stupid grown up stopping still in the path in front of me talk on his mobile (that was his fault).  Anyway I was also grumpy because at 4pm it was also still too hot. Fairweather works at both ends of the temperature scale.

Sunday morning was much better.  I was aiming for a longer run so didn’t push my pace and enjoyed the quieter and cooler park.  Most importantly while plodding around listening to audiofuel I was thinking about and planning for the Bupa 10K race and my final week of training.

The truth is, I havent done as much training as I would have liked.  However, I  reckon I’m not in too bad a shape.  I’m able to run further than 10K fairly easily, I can maintain my target race pace for about 2 to 3 miles (OK, OK, I was a puffing, red quivering heap by the end) and I’ve already run more times in May than I did last year AND been to the same number of BMF classes.  Over the past 12 weeks I’ve run or BMF’ed (sorry don’t suppose that’s a real verb) 44 times or on average 3.6 time a week.

So I’ve started to feel a little more confident that I can have a good race.  I also got to thinking, on that beautiful morning,  that I can’t always expect to run a PB at every race and should concentrate on enjoying running the race, taking part and just give it my best shot and I should stop beating myself up about being faster than the year before.  I am getting old after all!

So, a good weekend running.  I’ve got my head ‘sorted’ and a plan for this last week before the race.

Now I’ve just got to decide which running shoes to wear on the day …

At BMF on Monday morning, thankfully, the emphasis was on upper body, core and strength work (push ups, crunches, squats and lunges for the uninitiated) rather than running.  Here’s the view while we were having a coffee afterwards at the Serpentine, Hyde Park.