At the end of 2017 I sat down with my coach to talk about my training, after not achieving results that were expected of me. I was stunned and appalled to find out that I had only executed 35% of my slow runs correctly and this was impacting on my results. To be honest I hated slow runs. They frustrated me no end. I began to hate running these, as I really didn’t understand the benefits. However, this was not from lack of education from the coach. I always had good intention

Pre-race was something of a comedy of errors! Having arrived at the G at 5.30 for a 7 start so as to not be late I then missed the start by quite a few minutes hahah!. After dropping off my bag, stretching, going to loo, doing a short warm up run and some more stretches I checked watch. At which point I saw the HR was not picking up. Mild panic at this but told myself everything would be ok if I applied more water to strap which I did. Still no HR. Little bit more panic now b

This was my fifth marathon in 15 months! This is something that I am proud of considering where I started. I wasn’t going to run this race and only made the decision after Canberra, where for the first time I executed a race plan! The last two were a bit of a disaster to the point that I wasn’t sure that I wanted to do this again. I did not think that I could cope with another failure. My self confidence is not my strong point, but it was pretty nonexistent after Canberra