Nice one Rich,

I am still umming and arring about doing it but the foot is still a little tender and I know that realistically doing another 24+ hour race would put strain on family life having made a promise that the house renovations move up in the priority order for the moment although I can enter some shorter and closer events.

As for your training I can see you have ramped up the mileage of late with good rises and cycle downs to recover, whilst being very aware of your need to do consistent, bulk mileage I would personally like to see you take on some long, slow runs of 20-24 miles just to get the mindset and get the mental toughening up required for a 24 hour run. Looking at your stats you have not done many runs over 3 hours of late and so it will be really good to get some "time on feet" runs in, which if I read between the lines when it comes to your parental domestic duties will be hard but will be very beneficial to the overall training.

Good idea of getting loops into the training plan but also suggest that you do some out and backs, the reason I like these is they "guarantee" a set distance and can be used as a weekly or monthly set run to condition yourself to pacing and to pull off.

Last Uncle Jerry comment, just be careful about ramping up the mileage so quickly to 30 miles without vectoring in a proper recovery period, I am the worse person to offer this last piece of advice after my recent knee injury but would suggest that you first do it as a back to back say in the form of a 20/10 and later a 20/15.

Anyway, good luck and keep listening to your body

thanks guys for your advice.

To be honest I experimented with back-2-backs last year but prefer single longer runs and then reviewing the legs / body the next day to see whether I am feeling good enough to take on another semi - long run.

I know and understand why a lot of ultrarunners believe in back-2-backs however the injury risk involved if feeling very sore I cannot see the benefit of doing another 2 - 3 or 4 hours on a sunday.  So I think I will stick to runs of 4 - 7 hours and assess how I am feeling. Of course I won't be doing a lot of 6-7 hour runs but i think at least one of this length in the next 2 - 3 weeks will help with the mental prep and time on feet aspect.

I agree some out and back runs will help and I generally do these unless I am off road. I have planned at least one night run (between 10pm-5am) so that I can experience this drudgery again :-)

25-30 miles planned for tomorrow so I am looking foreward to ramping things up and having some fun. Hoping to experiment a little bit tomorrow on fuelling, I know what works for me but haven't eaten on any of my runs. I do so hate it but entirely necessary for this :-)

Cheers guys

Hey chaps.

Well with 19 days to go until TR24 training has been good and bad :-) Got some good 4 hour plus runs in plus some good tempo efforts. Life has got in the way a few times but overall I am happy with my fitness and recovery from long efforts during the past 6-8 weeks.

Of course you can always do more and I am trying to squeeze one more long run into this week which may involve running into the middle of the night (good mental prep) but overall I am a good as I have had the opportunity to be so it's a case of tapering from Saturday this week.

Got a few last minute items to get but nothing to panic about.

I have a buddy running solo as well in the race plus a host of other people i know in the team races so it should make it a very different experience to other ultras. I plan on sticking to my game plan for as long as possible and not worry about the crowds.

Mainly I am looking to have fun out there