My Forum

My advice - if you can't run due to injury don't enter a half marathon - particularly one of the most expensive ones in the country.

Off soapbox now. You need to work out what is causing the pain. Do your shoes fit properly? Are you running on a camber? How overwieht are you? What's your running history? Maybe a walk run program would be a good start rather than going out and running half a mile. (google couch to 5k)

If you can't work out what is wrong get referred to a physio who may be able to help. Good Luck.

DT we don't have a Dad's race, not sure about other schools. Some schools still do non competitive sports days

We do have a number of girls whose names I'm marking. Fingers crossed that in Team GB for Rio will be 3 girls that I've taught.(400m, Swimming and Water Polo)

I was at the Delamere Parkrun where the times were off. I was a little confused when I got the result but I know what time I got because I am capable of pressing the button on my watch when I start and when I finish. The voulnteers do a bloody great job and I've been really impressed.

With the huge numbers of parkruns happening there are bound to be glitches occasionally, but it's not like anyone's paid a fortune for it, or is counting on it to get a GFA time etc.

HeOw when you said the timer died I trust you mean the stopwatch rather than the person operating the stopwatch? (thanks for your time and effort btw - it's a great event)

I would write my own training plan if I was you. Maybe look at 6 week blocks and target different things as a primary focus in each block, increasing the intensity of the quality sessions over the 6 weeks.

For instance, at the moment I'm targeting my VO2 max level, and so am using one session a week to target this in training. My other quality session is the parkrun, which I run at between LT and 10k pace for a tempo run.

After this I think I'm going to aim to target LT, so start with the 3.1 miles of parkrun at this pace, and build until I'm doing something like 5k at LT, 10 mins rest, 5k at LT. The other quality session during this block will be something faster, probably alternating between 200s and 400s.

If you write your own programs then you can target whatever race you want, and build in other races as either races or quality sessions.

Another great session Bob. Hattoris are Saucony's zero drop shoes. It's taken me a while to build up to being able to attack faster paces in them, I think my muscles had to adapt to the slightly different angle. The only problem now being that they're bright orange and tend to attract drunk people in the park!