Nov-tastic

The wonderful people over at Marathon Talk, as well as putting together some fab podcasts every week, run a number of motivational competitions including their Spring marathon training one called Jantastic (which incidentally a lot of the Good Run Wall peeps are already signed up to for next year - including myself).  The aim of this is to set realistic goals and stick to them: and ticking off each planned run gives you a percentage/points ... well if this month was part of Jantastic I would be getting 94% for only dropping one of my planned 17 runs (for reasons explained in my Grumbles and Bruises post). It's nice to see so many ticks in my planner!

Also had the rather fab news that, although still rather painfully injured, my friend from the wall has had good news from their physio which means they will be back in the swing rather sooner than they had feared: so glad that we won't be losing them after all. Sending lots of hugs their way whilst on the injured bench though.

November Planner plus lots of ticks!

Today, being Thursday, was a run out with my JogScotland group (complete with a t-shirt I personalised yesterday - I don't think my gel-writing skills are up to much!).  We were down to two Jog Leaders this week for various reasons, which meant that we had to be a bit more inventive with routes etc.  I went off rather faster than I had intended to do after Monday's rather longer run - and quite enjoyed being pushed by two more advanced runners - spent the run between the lead group and running back on ourselves, and the more middling group.  We had pushed ourselves rather hard in places so we did allow ourselves a bit of a walk break after about 35 mins (courtesy of a rather too steep hill than we could face) - but looking at the pace we were setting much of the time it was much harder than I am used to!

Stats are a little odd, as we did some sprinting and doubling back in the railway tunnel, and therefore without satellite signal, so I'm not going to put them up. I have compensated at least on the distance for this by altering the GRG map of the route - and despite the walk break have ended up by my best age grading (which does sound right, given the perceived effort etc to keep up with the faster runners vs the pace when not underground!)

Aches-wise: my knee was grumbling a bit during the 2 million graduation ceremonies I've sung at this week (well, that might be a slight exaggeration) but was actually fine when running; back is complaining a little again but that's probably the singing/weird seats and is feeling millions better having achieved hot water bottle; and blister seems to have randomly sorted itself out (feet are weird).

Still debating parkrun potential this weekend: I really should have a slower run in the week, if only to be nice to my poor joints, but I also don't want to get totally out of the habit of it! I guess I'll decide what to do when Saturday morning comes round (and I always have shopping to buy if not - so an alternate route is to potter over to Morrisons and bus home). Think 3 miles should really be my max though, so as not to go too far over the 10% increase if I can help it - don't want to end up with an injury again.