Marathon training - half way

Today marks the end of week 9 of my 18 week marathon training programme and it's also the first week where I've completed all of the mileage in the allocated week. A four mile lunchtime run on Tuesday, a seven mile run at race pace on Wednesday, 11 miles in Fairlands Valley Park in Stevenage yesterday and then a gentle 4 mile recovery run this morning bringing my total for the week to, appropriately enough, 26 miles.

The 11 mile run was a little tougher than I'd expected - the park in Stevenage is a little hillier than I remember and I've been avoiding hills lately to give my sore knee a rest. It was also rather windy and I continued my recent bad habit of setting off too fast on my "long slow run" when I should be aiming to run around 10% slower than race pace.

Anyway, I did my 5 laps in a reasonable time and am happy to have reached halfway in my training with no major injury worries and having completed all of the distance runs successfully.

The next few weeks are the crux of the training - a 17 mile run next weekend, 18 the following weekend, then an "easy week", then 19 miles, another easy week, and then on 19th March the final long slow run of 20 miles before beginning the "taper" towards the race. At the moment I'm fairly confident but I'm reliably informed that after 15 miles is when your body starts to really complain so until I actually do those training runs I'm not going to know how I'll react.

As well as reaching halfway in my training, I also passed a landmark in my 1000 mile challenge - I've now completed the first 100 miles - 115.33 to be exact. So running-wise, everything's very much on target at this stage. Just need to up the pace a bit on the fundraising...