My first proper post here was meant to be about getting my place in the London marathon and about my training plan but since that’s still a work in progress and this blog is meant to be a training diary, I couldn’t not post about tonight!

The first Wednesday of every month is time trial night at my running club, Bishop’s Stortford Running Club. It’s the same 5-mile route around Stortford every time and a great way of tracking progress. I don’t run the TT every month, especially in the summer, when I’d much rather run in the country side than around town but I’m a semi-regular in winter.

I’m not a very fast runner but with an average pace of 10 minutes per mile, I’m also not the slowest person at the club. Slower runners often don’t fancy the time trial though, so there I come last more often than not. I don’t mind – to me, it’s a race against myself more than anything else. If there’s somebody of a similar pace running with me, I’ll try to race them as well but tonight wasn’t one of those nights. I wasn’t feeling overly confident about my pace tonight, especially as I’d had a pretty poor run with people at work yesterday, where I simply couldn’t keep up, but I was determined to try anyway. My personal best for the TT stands at 49’13” (clocked in February) but I was fairly certain I wasn’t going to come in under 50 minutes.

I couldn’t have been more wrong! Not only did I manage to come in under 50 minutes, I beat my PB by over 2 minutes! I may have been the last person by over 3 minutes but I’m absolutely chuffed to bits with my time!

The weather was pretty grotty for the first part of the run which, odd as this may sound, actually helped. I’m weird in that I quite like running in the rain (I hate walking or cycling in the rain) and it was absolutely bucketing it down for a while tonight. It really helped me keep my pace. At the same time, I managed not to get tempted into taking off too fast and overall only lost about 7 or 8 seconds from my average pace during the first, mostly downhill, half of the run to the final 1.5 miles, which sport two fairly tough climbs.

I haven’t had a chance yet to download the data from my Garmin but I wouldn’t be surprised if I had a reasonably even pace throughout the run. That part is as important as the actual time for me as good pacing is going to be vital during the marathon. More on that subject soon!