I’m sitting here on a Sunday evening with my legs up in a recliner chair. I’m resting my tired/tight hip flexors.

I’ve been pretty good at creating my own training programme this year, that is both slowly progressive and yet has built in sufficient recovery that I don’t get over tired or injured.

This week, however, I made an error in my calculations. I calculate running volume (so number of hours run) by week. My week is Monday to Sunday. In theory this method works. Last week I ran for 6 hours and this week I ran for 6.5 hours (in total). So far so good.

My mistake was in forgetting that I changed the running days around last week. In fact I’d changed my long run from Friday to Sunday last week and then done it this week on Friday as normal. Thus the following statements are both true. From Monday-Sunday this week I’ve run 6.5 hours (which is fine). From Sunday last week to this Saturday however, I’ve run 8.5 hours (not so good).

I forgot that you need to look at the week on a rolling basis. For now, I have a rest day tomorrow and will remember this little ‘rolling’ issue going forwards. Hopefully a day resting and stretching will put me to rights.

Yes I know. This is all quite boring training maths. But it’s a thing I do look at and have to think about. Perhaps some people are more robust but I need to ensure I don’t overtrain.

Outside the above, I’m very happy with where I’m at. This week I’ve covered 51km of running, 6km of walking (this fell short this week), done two yoga sessions and 3 very hard gym sessions (probably also the reason for my current John Wayne walk).

Typically in training for multi-day races people will reach up to 60-70 miles (96-110km) of running miles a week. So I’m away off that yet but I’m on my way there and doing ok – so hurrah. 🎉