My plans were pretty set for this spring. After my successful half marathon training for Bristol last autumn, I was going to try and push on and see what improvements I could make this spring at the Bideford Half Marathon. The race was carefully chosen to be about a month before Lolly’s pop date, so hopefully my training and her pregnancy wouldn’t clash too badly.

Which was great, in theory. But pregnancies don’t happen in theory, and nor do training plans. In order to follow a similar training plan to last time, I had to start on 12 December, the week after the Bovington Half Marathon. Even though I took a bit of a shortcut in that race, I’d still pushed myself pretty hard (harder than I’d realised, in fact) and my body was pretty broken. That week was also the week that I was meant to be running my 100th parkrun, which didn’t really fit with the plan. In the end, rather than the 31 miles called for by my training plan, I did 8.7.

Bovington was a good race, but it didn’t leave me in great shape to start a training plan.

The next couple of weeks went better: 32.6 and 34.6 miles. But if you scratch below the surface, things weren’t so rosy. These were the two weeks around Christmas, and between work and the celebrations, my running wasn’t too strong. I abandoned a lactate threshold run halfway through, my long run the first week was split into pieces because 1) it was Christmas Day and 2) there was a parkrun. The second week, I had the Chard Flyer instead, and with the foul weather, I didn’t add any extra miles in.

At this point, I decided that with the Stoke Stampede coming up, that although my training hadn’t been ideal, I would treat it as base training for eight weeks of proper training after. Except that I got a cold. So what would have been the first of those eight weeks involved two runs, totalling 6.1 miles.

Not how an ideal training period would look.

Alongside all of this was Lolly’s developing parasite pregnancy. Unsurprisingly, she has been getting more and more tired, and after her Christmas Eve parkrun, she really struggled for the rest of the day. It became apparent to me that a heavy training plan that would leave me tired at times would not combine well with a pregnancy that was clearing leaving Lolly pretty tired.

And so, plans have changed. I’m not going to run Bideford at all, but instead do Cheddar RC’s ‘The Big Cheese’, a 15-mile trail race. Admittedly, switching from a reasonably flat, road, half marathon, to a hilly, muddy, 15-mile race does not at first glance appear like taking a step down. But in reality, the long runs will probably be around the same distance, and I’m not so concerned about the pace. Sure, I want to do well, but there isn’t the pressure to be pushing myself up to and over my limit. As a consequence, there isn’t the pressure to push myself so hard while I’m training. I still want to do a good variety of sessions; intervals, long runs, tempo runs and some recovery stuff too. But I will be more able to tone them down and keep a better balance with home life. Which given I have two rooms to redecorate (amongst other things) can only be a good thing…