This week started badly as I had reopened a blister on the ball of my right foot from London during the long run last Sunday and the combination of an unfamiliar footing and broken ground up at Glen Tanar on Tuesday evening had left my right peroneus longus very sore, sufficient for me to miss training on Wednesday and Thursday. After a combination of foam rollering, massaging and kinesio tape I felt ready to run again on the Saturday.  

As I had an exam on Friday, which did not go well, the k9 children were in kennels.  We had planned to take our now running mobile, Eleanor - a VW T2 Transporter panel van, out into Glenshee where I would have a tranquil morning run.  This plan went out of the window when I overfilled the fuel tank filling Eleanor with a heavy smell of petrol. I had been scheduled to run twice for around a hour and a half each, but as the ankle still felt quite painful in the morning I opted to miss that session altogether in the end, but headed out in the evening for a bit of a test run in my old Asics Gel Nimbuses.

The evening run on Saturday went bizarrely well, floating through Aboyne castle with ease I looked at my watch to discover that I was threatening 8 minute miles, so I opted to extend my normal circuit slightly to head out as far as the golf course, and to let my legs go as quickly as they wanted to while not forcing the pace.  The pace slipped to about an 8:15 min/mi average on the climb back up from the Dee to the Deeside Road, which I was pretty happy with.

Conversely on Sunday morning I was only supposed to run for about half an hour, but opted to put a few extra miles in the bank given the last week, just heading out to Dinnet and back on the Deeside Road taking in the views towards Mount Keen and Lochnagar on a perfect Aberdeenshire Sunday morning.  Not sure where the grim weather is today, but it's sure not here!  Again a little into the run I looked at my watch which was averaging out at 9:30 min/mi and dropping and pulled that down to 08:55 min/mi with the help of a few negative splits on the return which for once were not induced by k9 Steve McQueen.  I had intended to run in my old Terrocs, which I have been thinking of switching into for the Cateran race, but changed my mind primarily because I could not find them!  I did opt to compeed up the old London blister which is healing nicely now, and the heel which blistered up as I wore through the heel webbing in my Inov8 Mudclaws, and this seems to have worked.

So in brief a week that threatened to be a disaster so close to the Cateran 55 race ended up being not so bad, and gave a few ideas for how to cope with certain aspects of the race.