Next stop: London marathon

The sun is shining, it's been a lovely weekend. The forest is full of butterflies; I haven't seen that many for ages. The final long training run has been run. Next week my training schedule will be very tapered (apart from the marathon on Sunday, of course). Three runs of 30 to 45 minutes, mostly in "regenerating" (i.e. snail) pace. Today's three hour run went quite well; at the end I felt that I could have soldiered on for a while. The problem is the pace. I should have run today with an average of 8:38 mins/k (that's VERY slow), but instead I did 7:40 mins/k. That is faster than I should have gone, but still considerably slower than what I am supposed to run next weekend. And right now I just can't imagine going any faster than what I did today, at least not for 42k. It means, I will probably need more than 5 hours next Sunday. I wasn't hoping for a personal best, but at least wanted to be under 5 hours.

This week's total effort:

specific - 528 mins, 68k (longest run: 3 hours)
unspecific - 60 mins