Better week this week, running fans. Sickness is almost all behind me, but I did get some bloods done just to double check everything was where it should be (stay tuned!). Only missed one of the hard sessions (an Over and Under Intervals sesh - 3 x 9 min stretches running at and around, or 'over' and 'under' if you will, Z3). Beyond that, the easy runs have all ticked over to an hour, and the Friday tough session was a Lactate Intervals Run (which just makes me think of milk), which involves (a very milk unfriendly) three sets where you do 8 repeats of Z5 sprints for 30 seconds with 15 seconds of Z1 'recovery' (spoiler: you can't recover in 15 seconds).

This was meant to be a recovery week for the longy, and just 2 hours, but on account of the numerous missed efforts over the past month I put in a three and a half hour session. 34kms and 700m of climbing. For this one, Stravas's route maker took me up on a delightful tour out north west toward Lane Cove, before looping back toward Sydney's northern suburbs, including the very particularly lumpy suburb of Mosman, before coming back over the Harbour Bridge and toward home. The Sydney Harbour 10km was on today too, so lots of people in their gear still kicking about the city as I passed through. Great to see!

That all gets me to 78kms this week which feels good. Despite the lingering effects of the cold, still feeling strong, so that's a relatively good sign. I'm coming into the final month of training so there's going to be some hard yards ahead. There's only two proper big runs to go - 4.5 and 5 hours - and I'm going to want to get some legit trails in with those. Great Northern Walk, which is an **amazing** trail that runs from Sydney to Newcastle is definitely in scope (might not do all of it) and I'm thinking I'll sneak back up to the mountains for the other one if I can co-ordinate that (repeats of the Kedumba climb, trigger warning for any UTA runners, are the likely candidate for those - 15km down and up with 700m of climbing).

I'll end this week with a massive plug for the aforementioned Strava route maker. I think you need a premium account for it, but it's well worth it if you're getting in long weekend runs or travel a lot. You open it up in the maps tab, and can plug in a range of filters (exercise type, starting location, hilly/flat, trails/road etc). From there it'll spit out a handful of options based on where people have gone before you. So good for finding new trails and routes! I tend to use it to find popular runs, then map something together based on those. Strava will overlay its 'heatmap', which shows how often people run various tracks, which helps to stitch together different sections you want to hit. I also used it for my blue mountains adventure a few weeks ago with great success! See what it throws your way!

Till next week,