Getting closer to the 2,000mile goal!

Last week felt alot more productive then the week before even if Mondays run was a slow recovery run as I really felt Sunday's 10mile trail run still in the legs....to be fair this wasn't surprising as I only finished the run around 2.30pm on Sunday.

To help things along I rolled my leg muscles on Monday evening to help the recovery and it appeared to do the trick for the most part.

On Tuesday I headed out for my second recovery run as normal, in the evening however I got a text from one of the lads who said he was going out for a 20mile run so I decided to tag along with the aim of doing 15miles miles.

I must say the legs felt heavy and I felt it during the run after mile7 so in the end I decided to cut it short at 10miles once we got back to the cars, to let things recover abit I did no running on Wednesday.

On Thursday I headed out the door at around 5:40am for 10miles at marathon pace, given how my legs were feeling earlier in the week I have to say I felt good during this run, I was confident about my pace so I completely ignored my Garmin until the very end of the run and was surprised to see 7:34min pace as I figured i was running around 7:45-7:50.

Friday was another easy enough 5miles run and due to other commitments Saturday was taken as a rest day.

Sunday arrived and I decided it was time to give Slievenamon another go, this time instead of going up and over the mountain I decided to try use the trails I've seen from satellite images of the mountain the run 80% of the circumference of the mountain.

Birds eye view of the mountain

The upshot of these trails is I won't have to climb nearly as much as I'm not going near the summit which means I can at least maintain some sort of momentum whilst still working in hill and trail work. 

As I wasn't back home till mid Sunday evening this meant i couldn't start on the mountain until around 4pm which gave me a max of two hours before 6pm as Met Eireann had issued a storm warning for then.

To be fair I wasn't too worried as I knew I would be skirting the tree line so I'd be somewhat protected and I was also pretty confident I'd have a path to follow.

Checking out the new route

The route was very much a mixed bag, outside of the rain and wind at times the path was a mix of grass, bog, stream beds and bounding over big rocks and lots of gravel so its not a route I'm going to run a record pace at.

It is however relatively flat when compared to running to the summit of Slievenamon so I could nicely maintain an even pace, even if that was around 10min mile.

I've mapped out the Slievenamon Loop following the trails I can see on satellite imagery and its coming in just shy of 16miles with 2959 feet of gain, so I'm going to aim to run it as a route next weekend if all goes well.

In the end I did cut the run short as I was supposed to be doing 10miles but cut it short at just over 3miles in so I knew I'd have a total of 6miles, I was just wary of the incoming storm and it was getting darker much earlier because of it. :)

The Slievenamon Loop

Finally, I now have less then 450miles to go before I hit my 2,000mile target before the 31st December 2014. Last year I only managed 1,651 throughout all of 2013.

As I have a 100mile race in May 2015 I've been thinking that I'll need to up the anti somewhat so I'm thinking straight off it would be best to set a new goal of 3,000miles or at the very least 2,500miles for 2015.

Last weeks runs broke-down as:

- Monday: 5miles @ 9:02min pace (recovery)
- Tuesday: 5miles @ 8:20min pace & 10.19miles @ 8:18min pace
- Wednesday: 2miles walk
- Thursday: 10miles @ 7:34min pace
- Friday: 5miles @ 8:36min pace
- Saturday: Rest
- Sunday: 6.52miles @ 10:24min pace

Weekly Total:  42 miles

Miles This Year: 1,553 miles