Gear part 2

As far as clothing from the waist up is concerned, the main thing is, for long runs at least, to wear a technical t-shirt or long-sleeved shirt. Cotton t-shirts are fine up to a point, but on a hot day, or a wet day, or if you're running more than about 10km cotton quickly becomes wet and uncomfortable and can cause painful chafing ("joggers' nipple").

So I have quite a large collection of technical t-shirts, most of which I've either bought in sales or have acquired as part of "goody bags" at the end of races. Ron Hill, New Balance, Nike and Asics all seem pretty good.

For cold or wet weather I have one or two long sleeved technical tops - a Berghaus one and a Nike one are the ones I wear the most. For the really cold days I'll generally wear a fleece on top, and any old woolly hat and gloves.

Fortunately it looks like the really cold weather is over for this winter and hopefully I'll be running in a t-shirt again soon.

A good week's running this week - four miles at lunchtime on Wednesday, 8 miles at race pace on Thursday, and then a long slow run of 17 miles at Greenwich yesterday. I decided to have a day off today even though there was a 4 mile recovery run on my plan - my knee is a little painful and at this stage it's probably better to give it an extra day's rest. 29 miles is probably still the largest weekly mileage I've ever done and I have 36 miles on the schedule next week so I'm sure I'll benefit from the extra recovery time.

I also went for a sports massage on Thursday which was a little painful at the time but I'm sure helped with my Saturday run - thanks Charlotte, and thanks Sally for the birthday gift.

So my total for the year is now 144.56 miles.