Second corporate sponsor and start of more speed work and interval training

To start off with I would like to announce that a second company has come forward to offer some assistance to my fundraising campaign.  Elemis has kindly agreed to donate some products that I can use as a raffle prize, although I have to find out exactly what products they are going to donate and the market value of them.  It is great to get some good names on board though, as then others are more likely to follow.  I am now trying to use this as a selling point.

The other topic is that my training will now shift slightly more towards speed work and interval training, as last weekend's run proved that I can do the distance when the time comes.  I only need to do one or at most two more runs over the 20 mile barrier and the rest will be made up of shorter distances.  I have taken 2 days of rest, except for the Tuesday lunchtime yoga, and today was time to do some more running.  I was wondering how my knee would fare up as it was quite sore on Monday and a little sore on Tuesday but it seemed to prove no problem at all.  I spent a good deal of time stretching after the run and I am icing it now just as a preventative measure.

I went running as usual with my colleagues, but instead of a steady run I decided to sprint off at various stages and then run back towards them, to try and get used to the lactic acid build up.  They in the meantime ran at a steady pace the whole way.  It was the first time I have used this approach whilst running with a group and it worked quite well.  By the end of 4 or 5 of these sprints I was rather tired.  I will most likely use this same approach for the coming Wednesday lunchtime runs.

I actually quite enjoy hill training too, so my next session will most likely be hill training.  It is the same on the bike as well.  Whilst most people see a hill as an enemy, some of us see it as our friend and wish there were a lot more hills around.  Actually one of the reasons I got a little down when I was living in the Netherlands was because there were no hills.  Then I moved back to Switzerland and I was instantly happy again that I had hills to run up and cycle up.