Tuesday

Long run which made me realise my mojo was still not returned. Disjointed, stopping, sluggish, slow. Sore ankle, knee, sluggish legs, and generally feeling drained.

On the plus side, a great route, firstly over Corstorphine hill great as always, then my first visit to Cammo estate, some nice little paths and of course the tower to visit.

Saturday

Run to/from parkrun for some miles, a decent tempo run and then opened up to go hard for the last kilometer. The wind being what it was, the steady pace of the 1st km was the same pace as going all out for the last one… 18:35.

Sunday

The Edinburgh marathon weekend (EMF). As usual a team was entered for the relay from work, I purposely took a short leg with the intention of working into a long run. This duly happened, with some considerable nerves as I took a new path on the way to my changeover point and started to envision scenarios of getting lost and either failing to make the point on time or having to leather it down at top speed to get there in time. Fortunately I arrived with plenty of time to have a pee, cheer people on and stand around nervy watching the incoming runners.

Then the usual game of ducking and weaving began. The relay starts 10 minutes after the main marathon start (there are 2 starts on different roads, one being 10 minutes later, and the relay starts with that one). This on top of being quicker than the 1-st leg runner means that everybody around is running much slower than you. Fortunately by this point most of the leg 2 is on open roads, meant to be to the left of the center line, whereas I was mostly ducking out past the center to fly past the crowds. Sometimes stressful but I was taking it a bit more steady this time, ended up about 32:30 (officially more like 33) for the 5.4 miles, from what I could tell about 4th for the leg.

The run home was distinctly upwind, and all I can say is I was glad not to be running a marathon against that wind.

It turned out my previous night’s calculations were slightly off, and in total the day came to 24 miles. Felt like I may as well have ran a marathon as I dozed off the rest of the day…