It wasn’t just because I’d uploaded nine years of running data to Strava that I was obsessing over mileage on my run. A quick look on Fetcheveryone showed that if I ran 16 miles this evening and then 6 or so tomorrow evening then I would break my all time record mileage for a calendar month. It wasn’t going to be easy though as covering the F1 testing meant that I couldn’t leave for my run as early as I’d have liked to. I think I left even later than I did on Tuesday, requiring a 6:41 opening mile and then half a mile at 6:12 pace to just make it to the club before they left.
Thankfully there was a couple of miles of easy paced running where I could recover from those early exertions and concentrate on the miles ahead. I wasn’t concentrating leaving Queen Elizabeth’s Park though, having splashed our way through I stopped my watch to allow all the runners to pass, I forgot to restart my Garmin. I didn’t realise until I neared Belton House, which turned out to be around 1.2 miles but at the time I wasn’t sure how far I’d lost.
After four or so easy miles, on the dark lanes towards Londonthorpe I put in a couple of quickish miles, made harder as they were all uphill. Thereafter I settled in a small group of three, running between 7-7:10 minute miles along eerily misty narrow country lanes. We maintained this all the way back into Grantham which was significantly quicker than in previous weeks and gave a good workout. Once in Grantham I tried to add some miles to bring the run up to 16. I had to guess somewhat, and ended up around a third of a mile short.
Legs were pretty good, although right abductor was still tight at times and the right hamstring is pretty sore to touch after I found some tight and tender spots during some Stick massage.