Weekend

In an ideal world I would have spent the weekend relaxing, putting my feet up and get tons of rest. Unfortunately, this is the real world, and if you think a father of 4 young children will ever get the chance to rest for an entire weekend, please let me in on your secret.

For a start, the grass needed cutting yet again, and since I'm sure as hell not going to do it next weekend, it had to be this one. And wouldn't you know it, within 10 minutes my old lawnmower sighed its last sigh and gave up for good. This required a trip to Killarney to purchase a replacement, and since I had to go there, I might as well do the weekly shopping. By the time I came back, half of the day was already gone, and I knew I wouldn't be able to finish the job in one day (that's the drawback of having a massive garden).

I got up reasonably early on Sunday (well, Shea woke me) to run the Kerry Way one last time before the marathon. The trail starts about 2.5 miles off our house, and on a nice sunny day I love running there. The original plan was to do the outward section of the loop on the trail, and then come back on the road with 2 or 3 miles at marathon pace, just to get used to that pace a little bit more. However, just after the junction towards the road I stopped dead in my tracks, hesitated for a second, and then turned around and headed up towards the mountain instead. I was just having too much fun on the trail, and the thought of running 7:10 pace in my old, clunky, heavy trainers just didn't appeal. I ran all the way up to the top, and got reminded why this is called "Windy Gap". After passing the summit of the road I went down on the other side towards Glenbeigh until the Garmin beeped to let me know that I had passed the 6-mile mark, and it was time to turn around. To my surprise I found that I much preferred running the trail upwards rather than downwards. It's a very technical, stony trail, and running downhill was rather tricky, and I'm totally unused to that sort of terrain. In addition to that, the top of my left foot started hurting each time I landed slightly harder than normal; running uphill, on the other hand, was fine. The road is ridiculously steep, if the elevation data is correct then it's over 1000 feet of climbing, plenty of which at about 20% grade, with the steepest bits well of 30%. Blimey. Of course it was a lot slower than a normal 12 miles run on the road would have been, and my quads were quite tired from all that climbing. I hope this run wasn't one of the stupid things I was supposed to avoid this week, but with 8 days to recover until race day I reckon I'll be ok.

Most of the afternoon (the part that didn't require me to work in Garden) was spent in Tralee where Shea took part in a show in the theatre there. According to him it was his first "real" show, because the school plays don't count, apparently. There we were, proud parents and all, and he had a great time. He's very proud of himself, and rightly so.

I've kept checking the weather forecast, and accuweather are starting to worry me. Each day they've added another degree to their forecast for 2 June, and earlier today they were predicting 22C/72F in full sunshine. This might not be excessively warm, but to someone who's used to 10C/50F that resembles a heat wave. Luckily, metcheck seem to disagree, 15C/60F and cloudy would be pretty much ideal. Let's hope accuweather are as useless as usual (actually, chances for that are pretty good - funnily enough, all of a sudden their forecast is for 17C/63F).

24 May

5 miles, 44:06, 8:49 pace, HR 133

25 May

12 miles, 1:54:52, 9:34 pace, HR 144
majority on trail

26 May

5 miles, 45:26, 9:05 pace, HR 132

Weekly mileage: 54