February Fighting Fit?

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

A good day today, with a half marathon completed and a further 10km of kayaking, just to round the day out.

My scheduled run was 20km, but it's hard to do 20 and not push on that little bit further for the 21.1km half marathon distance, which I duly did. Not a rapid time, but a steady training pace, and I was able to semi-sprint the last kilometre, so not such bad form really.

After a well-earned carbo-rich lunch, #1 son persuaded me onto the water for more gratuitous torture in the form of a 10km kayak outing - made all the more difficult by us getting the tides exactly wrong, thus ensuring we had an outgoing tide to fight on the way upriver and an incoming flood tide battling us on the way back downriver. At least it's all good cross training.

I was thinking however at the end of my run how I'd react if I was told to go out and immediately do it again. Could I run the full distance? How will I feel on race day when I hit that half-way point knowing I've got to do it all again AND that it includes the dreaded glycogen-depleted last 10km? And can I do it inside the cut-off time of 5 hours? All these thoughts gang up on me, but the simple truth is that despite a very disrupted and minimalist training schedule I'm travelling well; and I've still got 8 weeks before race day and I'm injury-free. This has therefore got to be the best shot I've had yet at the full marathon distance.

All in all, I'm feeling pretty good about things right now. Stay tuned, MLCM-watchers.