Boring Wins.

This weekend was the longest long run scheduled in my training plan.

My plan told me to run for 3 and a half hours and if I felt ok, carry on up to 4 hours, or up to around 20 miles.

So my plan was to head on out along the canal in one direction, and see what happened first: 2 hours or 10 miles - and then at that point, turn around and come back again.

I was armed with 2 litres of Tailwind (crikey, if 2kg on your back isn’t an incentive to remind you to keep drinking I don’t know what is!), an audio book and legs that felt alarmingly heavy.

3 miles in, the legs sort of disappeared and the miles ticked away.

I got to 10 miles, turned around and headed back the way I came.

Just to funk things up a bit, I put my tunes on with 3 miles left to go and the sun came out… those last 3 miles?

BLOODY BRILLIANT!!

Well, as good as 3 miles can be after the 17 that came before them…. and I clocked in 20 miles at 3 hours and 33 minutes, which was a total (and pleasant) surprise.

There you have it.

A long, boring run.

Nothing eventful.

No geese on the path.

No dead things in the canal.

People generally moving out of the way.

No dogs to get tangled up in.

Even the cyclists didn’t make me dive into a hedge at any point.

Weird.

So here’s a post about running where nothing happened. No obvious story, but actually… that is the story.

This is exactly what I wanted for the longest long run and those 20 miles just did exactly what they needed to do.

I’ll take that kind of boring every single time.