Most of the time, I love training for a race. I love the daily run, the easy shuffles, the occasionally interval session, I’m grateful for it and it’s part of my daily routine. I don’t question it or complain about it. It’s not even a chore. I never understood people who would say “I just don’t have time”. I thought it was just an excuse and they were scrolling or watching TV.

* I appreciate this makes me extremely lucky and let this be your friendly reminder to find something you actually like to do and do it.

But this week, my god, this week I’m lucky to have any kilometres logged at all. It was a constant assessment of how much time do I have today and squeezing in as much as I could.

With about 4 weeks to go, this week was meant to be pretty solid. After last weeks mini training camp, I knew the first few days would be a struggle.

Let’s just say, with the exception on my long run, not a single other day went to plan.

I missed one whole day (I drove 8 hours for work) and had three shortened runs for a variety of reasons mostly related to a complete late of available time. And no, I wasn’t willing to get up earlier than my 4:50am alarm to run then!

I figured sleep was super important given the training volume of the previous week.

The first crappy session I just blew it off. One day isn’t going to mess with anything and I could add those extra kilometres onto another run.

I have to keep reminding myself not to stress or worry about it because that will just make it worse. I did the right thing leading into surf coast by reducing the running to balance life stress and it worked out to be the best race I’ve ever run.

I’ve also completely forgotten what running with fresh legs feels like. Every run at the moment feels like a slog.

There was also the humming undercurrent of a pre-taper taper tantrum over my shoe choice that bubbled around in the background all week. I usually mock the people in the Facebook group who panic over shoes.

I bought new shoes, hated them, spent too long watching YouTube reviews, stressed about the crappiness of the ones I have and the risks of trying new ones so close to the race, not to mention the strange loyalty I have to a shoe that I’ve fallen out of love with.

A Jason Koop podcast on tapering pulled me back off the ledge and I did the appropriate thing of just buying new pairs of the shoes that work for me at the moment.

And now we continue the countdown, with about 9 days left of training before the taper.