Thursday photo #254

Is anybody else suffering with the mornings getting lighter? Libby seems to wake up with the light and can’t get back to sleep. She is also incapable of not waking Lia up, so they’re both up early and Lia is permanently exhausted. Buying blackout curtains for their room is a priority.

Spring

After the warm weather we had in February, the past few weeks have been a bit of a shock. Back to Winter coats and jumpers. It seemed perfect timing for the sun to return yesterday, on the first day of spring. I’m hoping Spring is here to stay now because I’ve completely misjudged the weather twice this week.

On Saturday, we saw the awful weather forecast and decided to grant Libby’s wish of going to soft play. The girls had a lovely couple of hours there, as they always do. It’s never my first choice, I’d much rather be outside but it seemed like a sensible day to do soft play. By the time we left at lunchtime, it was apparent that the torrential rain hadn’t materialised and a morning outside would have been fine.

The second time I misjudged it was yesterday, when I set off on a long run wearing my running jacket. Within a couple of miles, I’d realised this was definitely a mistake. The sun was deceptively warm. It was too late to turn back, so I kept going and ended up getting much too hot. But at least it was another training run under my belt.

Marathon training

I’ve never been one for following a training plan. They’re fine while they’re going well, but I find them too demoralising when I miss runs or get ill or injured. So instead, I decided to do my own thing. I upped my distances slowly, ran on the road more and ran a bit more frequently. There have been a few setbacks with both illness and motivation. But the advantage of not following a training plan is that I don’t feel like I’m falling behind.

The London Marathon is in just over a month. Am I ready? Ready enough I think. I won’t be running it particularly quickly. I haven’t even ruled out having to walk some of it, although I think I’ll probably manage to run at least most of it. Either way, unless something goes horribly wrong, I’ll get round. Hopefully I’ll raise some money for charity too. And it has kept me running through the Winter, which is definitely a good thing. In fact, the marathon is so close now that I’m starting to wonder what my next challenge will be.

After soft play on Saturday, we went out for lunch. We’ve been trying to encourage Libby to use spare bits of time for reading. It’s so difficult to fit in time to read, so using the odd few minutes here and there seems to be really helpful. While we waited for lunch, Libby read her book to Lia. I love how excited she looks in this photo, I hope she will always feel that way about reading.