The objective of today's session was to run for an hour at a comfortable pace then increase to race pace for the second hour before dropping back down to the end.

As things have been going fairly well in training recently I am now targeting around the 2:50 mark in June which gave me a race pace of about 6:30/mile. The first hour was actually pretty uncomfortable and I kept slipping away from my planned 7:30 easy pace, which meant I was a bit unsure of how the race pace element was going to go.

It was also chucking it down with rain and I had a couple of kit problems which didn't help, but when the time came to step up the pace I actually found it pretty comfortable. I managed to maintain a 2-in, 2-out breathing rhythm and felt my technique was solid throughout, and ended up averaging 6:27 which I was pleased with.

I had to play around with my refuelling and rehydration strategy because it's quite hard to run at 6:30 pace whilst swinging a rucksack around, unzipping pockets and getting drinks bottles out. In the end I opted to take on fuel and water just before the fast hour started, then again at the end without taking a break in the middle which I would normally have done.

I'm sure this will have made a difference to my performance and it's certainly not something I'll be doing on race day, but I seemed to feel fine so I just went with it.

In the middle of my race pace piece a couple of cars tried to stop me to ask for directions and I only had time to say that I couldn't stop! About 10 minutes later the cars drove past me, presumably still looking for where they were going and threw a half eaten sandwich at me.

I had to laugh because it's probably the sort of thing that I would have done when I was 18 :)