Not the best week....

Tues - 15 mins hills
Wed - 50 mins, 10k's @ 4:54 mins/km
Thurs - 80 mins, 16k's @ 4:51 mins/km
Fri - 50 mins, 10k's @ 5:15 mins/km
Sat Night - 120 mins, 24k's @ 4:55 mins/km
Tues - 1 min on, 30 secs off

It has not been the best week for me. At times, I've felt like I'm struggling to do the sessions on my program, let alone any quality sessions. A few niggles have not helped matters. I accept there will be weeks like this in a marathon program and I expect a few more weeks like them in the next few months, but that doesn't mean I have to like them!!!

Last Tuesday was 15 minutes of hills in the Gardens. With a fair bit of trepidation, I completed 15 minutes entirely on grass at close to full intensity for the first time in over a year. With my shin history, I shied away from totally flogging myself and it will be a while before I'm confident enough to run carefree on the grass.

Now as I don't believe in Valentines Day(Why should Myer and DJ's dictate to me when I can spoil MJ???) I decided that in order to top anything done by most blokes on boring old Valentines Day, I would get in early and surprise MJ with dinner at Baguette http://baguette.com.au/ Gees!!! If you have never dined there, do yourself a favour and give it a go - the food is absolutely divine. I had the Casino Green Mountain loin of veal with sweet potato, beans, chorize and mustard hollandaise while MJ had Bundaberg scallops on the shells with capsicum sauce and an aioli that I fail to recall. It was easily in the top five meals I've ever had. Now that was a good night!!!

My Wednesday and Thursday runs were solid whilst I put in a shocker on Friday on the treadmill struggling to get through the 50 minutes. Saturday Night was better as I went out to Caboolture to cover the Dusk to Dawn for R4YL and did my Sunday long run as part of a relay team. Really enjoyed the opportunity to run on the compacted dirt track and it was fun to run through the torrential rain and thunderstom that lashed the field for 30 minutes and forced us to slip and slide through muddy conditions. It was not without its problems though with a toe on my right foot slipping down and pushing uncomfortably and repeatedly into the shoebox - the first time I've had the problem since the 2004 Gold Coast Marathon when I was wearing a shoe half a size larger. Its a problem that I'll keep in the back of my mind and look into as some stage. Great to see a handy PCRG presence at Caboolture with Tess winning the 6hr, Clairie running strongly and Toasty putting in a nice run also.

Some anxious moments yesterday when my shins started to ache - nowhere near as bad as when they were at their worst bust still the worst they've been in a while. My mind went into overdrive. Were the shins affected by the slipping and sliding through the mud at Caboolture? Have my orthotics broken down and are no longer providing me with sufficient support as Bruno speculated could be the case during Friday's rub? Or was I simply coming down with a cold or virus which always makes the shins ache? Only time will tell, but I gulped down plenty of vitamin C in case its a virus.

30 secs on, 30 secs off in the Gardens this morning - some on the grass - damn it. The shins felt much better this morning, but the grass we were traversing was quite uneven so I decided to run about 1 min hard on the pavers and recover for 30-40 secs on the grass which I did at a fair tempo for 15 minutes. It rained pretty heavily in the early hours of the morning and was still raining when I left home. As expected, numbers were down on the 70-80 who would normally have attended with only 50 or so in attendance. There is always some satisfaction in attending a session in the rain when plenty of others have stayed in bed!!

This week - 10k
This month - 111k
This year - 420k