NDJ's London Marathon - week 3

I worked out that at a conservative estimate, I spent about 8 hours walking around Dublin (and airports) last weekend, including 3 hours in one go on Saturday morning, so I'm not feeling too bad about having sacrificed a week 2 training run for the trip. Also, Guinness is full of iron and other nutrients, so it was really quite a healthy weekend...

Anyway, on to week 3! This was the week where the overall mileage started to feel a bit more challenging. The individual runs are still within my comfort zone (just!), but before I started this training plan I wouldn't have done two 45 minute runs and a 1 hour run in the same week. But then that's the challenge of moving from being a 5k/10k runner to doing a marathon, and it's not like I didn't know this was going to happen!

I'm starting to settle into a good pattern with my two standard runs - one on Tuesday evening when I get home from work, one late Thursday afternoon because it's my working from home day. Just like last week, the Tuesday night run turned out slower than normal, and I'm becoming increasingly convinced that it's something to do with running in the dark. Thursday's run was faster and easier, getting home just as the sun was going down. 

Today's long run was an hour, and it felt pretty good. In fact, I was really tempted to push on a bit further when I was coming to the end, as I knew my legs had more in them, but I made myself a promise that I would stick faithfully to the training plan, so I did. I think I'm feeling the pressure of knowing that the long runs go from minutes to miles in week 6, and I'm worried given my mileage at the moment that it's going to be a really huge leap from running 80 minutes to running 10 miles. Then again, as soon as I stop thinking 10 miles and start thinking 16km I feel a bit better. It's weird, the miles versus km thing - 26.2 miles sounds terrifying, but 42km sounds like, well, four and a bit 10k's. Which for some reason is better. 

I've got to start thinking properly about cross-training now. I do one to one pilates with my awesome teacher Angela on a Wednesday night, but otherwise at the moment I haven't been doing anything. I'm well aware I need to get back to strength work, especially upper body, so I'm going to sort out a plan for that this week. Also, I'm very close to fixing the two charities I'm going to run for, so I'll be sorted before we hit three months to go on 26th... 

Oh god, three months really doesn't sound like a very long time, does it? I have moments when I really waver about whether I can do this. But I really want to do it, so hopefully that's what will carry me through.