A quick round up

I am very aware that I haven't blogged for ages, so thought I would give a quick round up of what had been happening over the last few weeks. Well, it has been cold. Very cold. When we started last week's West Highland Way run from Inverarnan, the temperature was minus 7, and it didn't get much warmer as the day went on. The path to and from Inversnaid was quite icy in places. I took it very cautiously, didn't fall (although had a few near misses), and really enjoyed the day. I've decided that is going to be my only objective for the 2009 WHW race - to enjoy the whole experience: training runs, the build up, the race itself, and the post race celebrations. So far I feel that I'm very much on course.

I've had a busy week with a dinner almost every night, so I thought I did quite well managing to run on 5 of the last 7 days, including a good 13 miler on the roads round here earlier today. Most of these runs were in freezing, dark conditions - there really isn't much light in Scotland at all at this time of year, which can be quite depressing. The Subversive Runner was up in Scotland this week and I was hoping to meet up with him on Tuesday for a beer, but unfortunately he had to call off - probably a good thing for my liver, I suspect, which is liable to take a bit of a hammering as we get nearer Christmas. Allybea and I had the pleasure of attending the Sunday Mail / sportscotland annual awards dinner in Glasgow on Thursday night. It was a great night, with loads of big names attending, and I was delighted to see Chris Hoy win the main award, the 2008 Sports Personality. I was even more pleased that he couldn't collect it because he was training - I was starting to get a bit concerned that all these award dinners could not be doing his training programme any good at all. Sir Alex Ferguson was presented with a lifetime achievement award by Alex Salmond, the First Minister, with his acceptance speech being described as 'inspirational' in today's Sunday Mail. I would have described it as 'ok', but Sir Alex is probably now operating at a level where anything he says is now considered 'inspirational' - I guess you are entitled to that kind of status when you have won the Champions League twice and the Premier League 10 times or whatever.

Talking of inspiration, mine at the moment is trying to reach my target of running 2,000 miles in the year. I have decided that 2,000 miles is a good target to have - it helps motivate me to get out running on these horrible cold nights, when it would be a lot easier not to bother. I think that my run today means I have now run 1,926 miles, so I have 74 more to do.