Sommething wicked this way comes!

That would be the Grim Reaper 70 mile ultra marathon, in just over three weeks now. And it's a combination of taining for that and a busy work schedule that have kept me from posting here for two whole months.

Before I get carried away with what I've been doing, apologies to all three of my loyal readers who I'm sure were on tenterhooks all that time.

Since that last entry, I've had my usual schedule of travels around the country, experiencing the delights of Redditch, Portsmouth and Luton, mixed in with an industrial town south of Rome and then last week a 10 day trip to Sydney and Christchurch in New Zealand.

Training wise it's been reasonable.

• I've run 385km in 34 hours
• I've cycled a mere 38km for a club time trial, warm up/cool down included
• I've rowed a trifling 6871m in 30 minutes, when I didn't fancy a run
• I've ten whole hours to yoga.

The highs?  Yes, there have been some; including a decent first time trial for the season, a longest single run of 40km and a weekly high of about 80km, which I'm pretty happy with.

And the lows? As April went on, I was having increasing pain in my knees, mainly I think due to increasing the overall training load with it being almost exclusively running.  It seemed to be ITB related from the way the pain was working, so  I took the decision to have a week off from running and work exclusively on yoga and on knee strengthening/flexibility.  That turned out to be a great decision as it's been much better since.  I'm now looking at kinesio taping to help even further and, when time allows will try adn get myself to a sports therapist to look at the longer term solution. 

With the race only just three weeks away now, I've dropped the long run in favour of shorter back to back runs of 20-30km each day on a weekend.

So as it's now just three weeks away, the plan is now to have two more semi-long runs this weekend and then start winding it down for the next two weeks before scaling back to just maintenance in the week before the event.

Photos from down under will come later.  All I can say now is that Sydney was horribly wet, and that Christchurch is a beautiful town, but is still suffering in a big way from the effects of the earthquakes they had.

And I will try harder next time not to leave such a big gap