Lloyd Biddell

Today was my last scheduled race prior to the Bournemouth Marathon in 3 weeks’ time.  Whilst only a 5 miler, part of the course goes within 20 metres of my front door so any opportunity to have a bit of a sharpener was not to be missed.  I purposely did not ease off during the week and made sure I did a reasonably decent Thursday session followed by my normal Friday run and then just eased back to a shorter run the day before.  As a result my legs were pretty fatigued going into the race, but frankly that was the whole point.  I also wanted to test out the Nike Vaporfly 4% racers I had bought about 18 months ago but due to injury have never worn.  These shoes were released to much fanfare as part of the Nike ‘Breaking 2’ project where it was claimed that due to the plate inside it could make you run up to 4% quicker – something not to be sniffed at if true.  The plan today was to break them in and see how my feet got on with them and if all went well to use them at Bournemouth. As th

Since the Burton 10k I've been on holiday to the deep south of the USA.  Any idea of doing any serious running was pretty much straight out of the window when in the heat of the day it was hitting anything up to 42c.  The heat itself was the smaller problem, what made it pretty much unbearable was the humidity - even first thing in the morning when it was c. 30c the only way to cool down post run was a cold shower.  It was also strange that often my trainers would not dry out during the heat of the day due to the humidity and quickly made them quite pongy!  The focus was therefore just to get some time on my feet and not indulge too much in the unavoidable junk food that prevails in the USA. Four weeks today I have the Bournemouth Marathon and frankly I had no idea what kind of pace I should be looking at.  I've done virtually no long run pace/tempo work which has concerned me for a while now.  Even the races I've done in the last few months were not very informative as e