Despite doing almost as little as I did last week, everything felt better. I think it’s because of the 12 miler I did last Monday - that just sorted my head out properly. Most of the week was hampered by a huge blister on my foot that had rubbed up the week before but that I hadn’t done anything about. I treated it properly on Tuesday and it seems fine now.

Running went okay: 5 miles (steady pace) on Wednesday and 6 miles (easy pace) on Friday. I had planned to do a five mile race yesterday but owing to other (family orientated) priorities, there was no way it was going to happen. I’m not worrying though as rather than take a rest day today, I’ll do a hard 5 miler to make up.

The only weak point in the schedule is the off days. I should be doing either speed work or weights (the training plan says speed, I’m thinking weights) but I end up doing nothing. This week will hopefully address that. I may well vary the training plan, however, and spend sometime on the cycle machine as I still haven’t cycled anywhere and the Rat Race is now less than 2 weeks away. It’s too late to do any significant practice but just prompting the muscle memory to remember how to do it will be better than nothing

I did get an email through about the Rat Race this weekend. They gave some hints as to what might be coming up. There will definitely be some off road biking and definitely biking down steps (any helpful tips for this would be, er, helpful). We’ll also be visiting a London stadium too. This is an interesting tip and I have an idea about what’s going to happen here based on previous Rat Races in Edinburgh - it will probably involve abseiling. I also notice that there’s nothing scheduled at the Emirates Stadium that day either. We’ll see.

Is it too late to mention that heights terrify me?