Week 30 - big mileage, big climbs

As the previous week had been so massively short on both mileage and ascent, I had to make a strong effort to get back on target. I knew reaching the target of 210 miles and 30,000 feet ascent for May is likely to be unobtainable but I'd try my best to get near.

The easiest way to start would be my oft-used route over Winter Hill to Belmont and back so that was Monday's run followed by a seven mile walk on Winter Hill on Tuesday. Back to the Belmont Run on Wednesday then a walk to Bolton to get my new camera on Thursday. The walk is mainly along the Middlebrook Trail, not the most scenic of walks but least it meant most of the route is traffic free. Another run on Winter Hill on Friday followed by the Saturday morning run with the wfdbwgua group.

Normally I would rest the day before a race but the mileage was important so following Saturday's fairly leisurely run of nearly three hours, on Sunday my warm up for the 5 mile Smithills Serpent trail race was to run the five miles to the start and followed the race by running home to give me 15 miles on the day.

Overall this gave me a total of 75 miles for the week of which 58 were run. I don't think I've ever run that many miles in a week before, even when training for a marathon - probably the most I've done is 52 miles, twice both at race pace as part of the Tour of Tameside.