Evening folks.
Cheers Paddy. I always like to get one over on Clare in particular. Thank God for Brendan Cummins. We're in big trouble when he retires! Congrats to ye as well. That is some turn-around in fortunes, but as you know yourself you've got a huge ask in the final!
Nice one on another mara JH. Tough course from the name/time I assume?
ceal - hope that hammy heals up quickly.
TmR - sounds you're like me, the more aerobic the better, with tight control on the other stuff - I think that's why the Lydiard approach suits me, the 'other stuff' has a limited time span. Glad to hear you're feeling better though.
AF - CD was on the same leg as me today (though thankfully nowhere near me as he had a stormer!).
NZC - I've got a much better appreciation for those kind of runs after today. I'd never run any kind of trail before the recce on Wednesday evening (bar a very odd mile or two here or there), so hadn't fully realised quite how much concentration is required when you go off-road.
Right, the Ridgeway. Tbh, I really really shouldn't have been there as my temp was well up all day, but figured I'd dope up a bit and see how I got on. During warm-up, to put it politely, I was sweating like a pig wrapped in tinfoil on a hot summer's day so one of the guys had a word and told me to take it as easy as I needed to without doing myself damage and not to worry if I was overtaken.
Needless to say, as soon as I was tagged I just thought 'Sod it' and figured I'd run as fast as I could for as far as my legs would manage and then worry about getting to the end...... All was going pretty decently, and then I took a wrong turn and ended up sticking an extra 1/2m on.
Up until I got lost I was still managing to hold a sub-6 average despite my legs feeling like 2 lumps of lead, but then I got a bit flustered as I was really worried about being able to keep it together until the end of the leg (stomach was all over the place and was starting to feel the effects of the high temp). At the end of it I found out that I had started the leg with a lead of 6mins 40s, and despite the 1/2m detour still managed to extend our lead to 7mins 50s.
The splits should give an indication of the terrain: 5:13, 6:53, 5:53, 6:21, 5:51, 5:43, 5:22, 5:55, 6:58, 7:01, 6:45, 56 (for the .16 at the end of it).
All in all, a great day. The rest of the team done great and we ended up winning in ~9h 35mins 
w/u and c/d brought up 17m for the day, and 120m for the week, so not too bad for my first week back
