It's elevating and humbling at the same time. Running along a beach at sunrise with no other footprints in the sand, you realize the vastness of creation, your own insignificant space in the plan, how tiny you really are, your own creatureliness and how much you owe to the supreme body, the God that brought all this beauty and harmony into being. - Sister Marion Irvine, 2:51 PR and 1984 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials qualifier

This last week I've dreaded some of my runs but whilst 3/4 of the way through most of them I've thought "this is not as bad as it seems" and "was that it". I am trying to remember this before each run. For example, I went for a 10 miler this morning. When I got up at silly o'clock my legs were hurting but I thought once I'm 2 miles down the road I should be hunky dory and guess what: I was.
I'm reading Born to Run at the moment and the chapter I'm on talks about a very experienced coach in America who knows everything there is to know about VO2 max, Lactic Threshold, Nutrient and is trying to work out why the American standard of Long Distance Runners has gone down since the 1970s. He is eluding to the conclusion that it is love for running. Nobody told the running guys of the 1970s that with running 100 plus miles each week should injury you so they did it! Nobody told them that running when fatigued or running over 90% for your max heart rate for X amount of time is wrong. They just ran because they loved it.

This next few weeks in my training I am going to add some marathon pace running to ingrain this my into my muscle memory for the Chester Marathon.

That's all folks.