Good afternoon my lovely running mates.
I have just had the most enjoyable shower, basking in the lovely warm glow not of the water, but of having just run for the longest distance I have ever done, namely the 8k run of week 4. And it was a blast!
To set the background here, I have had a hard week, not slept well, and I have a really bad cough. It wasn't looking good for 8k, so I set off with an open mind thinking that if I was struggling I could always turn back after 2.5k and make this the 5k run instead.
Off I trotted down the towpath, and I went the other way towards Poynton and Macclesfield rather than towards Marple and the Peak Forest canal. My idea had been to run 2k in one direction, 4k back, turn round, and then the final 2k would bring me home. I decided against that. At 2k I felt really good actually, and my right thigh which has been troubling me a little was not complaining at all. So - I decided to ditch my plan of turning around and keep going to 4k, so I wouldn't have any easy get-out from running the full distance.
I don't normally run this way along the canal, as I have in the past found it quite boring, but today, with the sun out but the temperature not too warm, it was just perfect. I felt I had Sadie-runs' robot legs from early on, and I just kept going at a nice steady pace. At around 3k I did hit a bit of a wall for some reason, but I quickly realised this was purely a mental wall, no sign of Donald Trump anywhere, so I just ignored it and ran.
By now this was getting quite interesting as I had never been this far along the towpath, and the changing scenery was enough to distract me from feeling tired or anything, and before I knew it, my headphones were telling me I had reached 4k, time to turn around, and say hello again to the dog-walkers I had overtaken not 5 minutes before, much to their amusement.
I have recently been using fixed-tempo running music from podrunner.com, which has really helped me control my pace. Today I ran to a 155bpm track, as I usually do on longer runs these days. That keeps me from going too fast, and stops me going too slowly. I can still vary my pace naturally, by adjusting my stride, but I find I always run at around the 7:20-7:30/km mark at this tempo. If I'm doing 4 or 5k I tend to go slightly faster, but this speed was perfect for me today.
I had a slight crisis at 6.5k when the music I was listening to finished, but I managed to find a new 155bpm track without slowing down too much 
And before I knew it, I had run 8k and it was time to slow down for my warm down walk. I was so tempted to keep going for another 1k then turn round, but I was good instead. I'm not sure how my body would react to that much increase in distance that quickly.
So there we have it, just the 5k run of week 4 to do now. I'm *really* enjoying this.
Oh - I'll add a pic I took to this post. It's quite hard to take pictures while running, but, well the canal is nice 
I took on the hills and I won, oh and ran 11.2k :D
10K Run
