A wise man once said...

..."it's never too late to start making excuses".

Given that it's only a few days until the West Highland Way race, I thought I'd start on the excuses now. ;-)

In my last post I was full of the joys of running 3 ultras in 8 days. In fact this year I've had my heaviest ultra racing schedule ever but I've loved it. Doing lots of racing really simplifies the decisions over training. Namely, you just try and rest and recover between races with just enough training to keep you ticking over so to speak.

Unfortunately, since my last race (the Cateran trail), I've had a bit of a yawning gap in my racing schedule and this, combined with the pain of a couple of cracked ribs, resulted in a major loss of mojo over the last 4 weeks.

My Garmin Connect dashboard tells me that I've run a rather feeble 56 miles over the last 30 days. I've not be completely idle though, I have been out on my bike a bit clocking up another 220 miles which still isn't much but better than nothing. I have, where possible, always made sure that those are *hilly* miles though.



This was my ride yesterday (Tuesday). It's a great run and for once the weather was perfect. I stopped on the way up the hill over to Barr to snap this picture which really doesn't do justice to the fanatic view of Ailsa Craig that day.



I was also lucky enough to accidentally meet up with another cyclist going the same direction and having company made the hills fly by.

Anyhow, by rights, I ought to be really panicking about the race this weekend but I'm feeling surprisingly relaxed about the whole affair. Even a call from my support runner the other day to say that he had gone lame didn't faze me too much. With a few phone calls I've managed to arrange a good back-up plan should he not be fit by Saturday so no worries there.

As to how I'll do, well that's the big question. Earlier on in the year I was thinking that a sub-23 should be easily doable (my pb is 22:58) and whilst I'd dearly love to do that, given the past month of sitting on my arse, I don't think that that is likely to occur. That said, I *am* well rested. ;-) Also in my favour is that fact that I don't seem to have put on any weight in the last month and am currently the lightest I've been for years so that's gotta help.

If I can get under 24 hours I'll be well pleased. Given the weather forecasts that might be hard. It was notable just how much the wet conditions seemed to slow everybody last year so perhaps I should just relax and concentrate on snagging another goblet and let my time take care of itself.

I'll finish with a picture of some rather delicious beans I cooked tonight. I've been 90% veggie since about February and feeling a lot better for it.



This is a blend of sautéed onions, red chilli & garlic in olive oil mixed with butter beans, olives, cherry tomatoes, roasted peppers, lemon zest, lemon juice, a tad of tomato purée and seasoning. Very tasty indeed if I say so myself.

Good luck to everyone running in this year's WHW race (and the WS100!) this weekend. If you're on the start line you've already made it further than a lot of runners this year so well done! All you have to do is just keep putting one foot in front of the other and a goblet is yours.