What's so good about round numbers anyway?

Apologies to regular readers for my lack of blog posts recently.  I used to write them on my train journey to or from work, but now I'm based at home, I don't have this time which would otherwise have been useless.

I've managed to create my website www.aihl.co.uk. And there is a blog on there with more serious running advice, so if anyone is looking to get into running it's probably a good place to have a peek.  Also have started a beginners running club and am taking people for 1:1 nutrition consultations.

What's great about this new lifestyle is that I am able to follow all my advice, about eating well and often, and fitting in all my training.  I've run 96 miles so far this month/year.  I did think about waiting until I'd got to 100 to post, but decided against it.  Us runners are a funny bunch.  When we're hooked up to our garmin and we have a 12 mile run in our plan, if the garmin says 11.84 miles as we get near our front door, we will run right past it.  We will do exactly the same thing if we've got back to our car and there happens to be a war memorial to circle.

Yesterday, I said no to this obsession.  Saturday had been a lovely 14 mile run at Pitsford water with @mia79gbr.  My plan had a 16 and an 8 mile run at the weekend to make it up to a 40 mile week, so clearly I had to go out for 10, but it wasn't a nice run.  I actually hadn't followed all my advice for pre-run preparation, the most important perhaps being to go to the toilet PROPERLY before heading out for a run any longer than 5 miles to avoid the runs.  Low and behold, my lower abdominal area started grumbling about 4 miles into the run.  I didn't want to extend the run by 2 miles in search of a toilet in Wivenhoe so instead turned back a bit early to find one in Castle park...  I felt much better after this and the last 1.8 miles of this run were certainly the best.   Completed the run at 9.8 miles after detouring around the development to get some extra distance in.

Got home had a bath, got into cozy clothes and slippers, and checked on garmin connect to find I had run 39.72 miles this week.... D'oh!  

How annoying is that!  I told Facebook and had several encouragements to go for a little jog, but I chose not to.  This week's plan has 41 miles, so I'm sure I will go over 40 this time.  And although I didn't last week, it's still the most distance I've ever run in a week, which included 2 tough training sessions.  12x400m @ 5k pace (mine ended up faster) with 90s rest, and the 14 miler with Sarah, which ended up quite a bit faster than I've been doing my long runs, and included a mile at marathon pace and a mile at half marathon pace- good going after 3.5 hours of driving!